


Icarus and Styx

by SpaceGoat



Category: Far Cry (Video Games), Far Cry 5, Far Cry: New Dawn
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Ghosts, Animal Attack, Blood and Injury, Canonical Character Death, Child Death, Exorcisms, Flashbacks, Gen, Graphic Description of Corpses, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, No underage, Non-Consensual Touching, POV First Person, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Stabbing, Strangulation, Suicidal Thoughts, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-11
Updated: 2019-10-08
Packaged: 2020-01-11 17:21:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 36,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18428630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpaceGoat/pseuds/SpaceGoat
Summary: Carmina Rye, born on the day the world exploded into fire, is cursed to see the spirits of those who perished in the Collapse, and the bloodshed before it, wandering Hope County. Unsure of why, but determined to help them, she keeps a list of every ghost she sees, so that someday soon, she can set on a journey to move these troubled souls onto a better place.Then she meets him.Like Icarus, his wings burnt and he fell from the sky.The man in the coat with the planes on it.





	1. Carmina

**Author's Note:**

> Hello all! My name is Chloe- you can find me on tumblr at unclefungusthegoat! If you follow me there already, you might know that I've been harping on about a fic where Carmina sees John's ghost and, well... here it is at last! Thank you to those who have waited so patiently!
> 
> It's alternating first person POV from both Carmina and John's perspectives!
> 
> It also takes place before the events of Far Cry: New Dawn!
> 
> On a briefly serious note, I'd like to reiterate, even though it shouldn't need saying: Carmina is 17, and therefore a minor. John may be a creep, but he's not that much of a creep, and so this is in no way written to be a shipping fic. Any comments about such things will be removed.
> 
> That being said, I hope you enjoy!

When you’re born on the day the world ends, baptized by fire and ice and fear and death all at once, there’s pretty much no doubt you’re cursed.

I mean, what a start to my life. To see so much destruction and chaos when my eyes were barely open. And ever since then, it’s been one long itinerary of ‘ _the things I’ve seen_ ’. I sound like one of the old war vets Aunt Grace is always telling me about, who never let go of the sight of people bleeding out in the streets, who never quite forget the look on a guy’s face as he feels his life slipping away. And I sound like my Dad. He still stares at his scar in the mirror. It’s white and flat now, but Mom says it’s like a part of him was torn away with it.

They’ve all got lists of shit they’ve seen, places they saw burn, people they saw die.

So, seventeen years old, and what’s mine?

Well, I first saw the sun when I was six.

I learned how boars and bears and birds were all different. How the mountains didn’t quite reach the clouds. That white flowers among the grass, or green light under the water’s surface meant you found another way around.

I was seven and a half when I first laid eyes on Joseph Seed.

Ten, when I saw the county from the sky.

I rode shotgun in my namesake plane, almost a sister to me, buttercup yellow and beaten real bad by all the things  _she’d_ seen. I stared out at the forest, and the houses sunk beneath the dirt, and I tried to picture how it had all looked before. How everyone else still saw it, and what they sought to rebuild from the ashes.

Dad used the last of the juice in Carmina’s engines to take me on that first and probably final trip to the stars. Ryes in the skies. Just the way it was meant to be. He’s promised to teach me soon, if we can get her off the ground again.

Ten years old, and I thought I’d seen it all.

I mean, I’d never been to city. Or swam in the ocean, or gone on a rollercoaster. I’d never sat in a car on a freeway, been to the movies, shopped at a mall, tried to order liquor at a bar with an obviously fake ID and even faker stood-on-shoulders-with-a-beard routine. I’d never even been to a proper school.

But that was the old world.

All shallow, and cold, and lost, shadows of a country that destroyed itself.

I’d seen humanity for who they truly were. Settlers. Survivors. Families who build a home from nothing, because all they really need is each other. And yeah, _animals_. Heartless. Selfish. Chaotic. People who'd burn down whole settlements just for a glance they thought disrespectful.

I really had seen all  _my_ world had to offer.

Until the first time I saw a ghost.

I was twelve.

Well, that was the first time I really understood. I could have walked past hundreds before then. Maybe the girl who was cleaning her rifle on the roof of an old gas station? Or the guy sat staring at what was left of the Henbane, with no line in his fishing pole? Or the masked figure I saw hiding in the trees, watching us sit on what was left of our porch, day after day. Never coming closer, or calling out to us. I caught the sound of their breathing once, like they’d swallowed an engine, this guttural rumbling sound in their chest. Like it hurt their lungs to do it.

Nah, this time? I  _knew_ she was a ghost. She was by the side of the dirt track up to my family’s airplane hangar. Just standing there. Her hair looked like it hadn’t been cut in forever, and she was wearing this dirty white sweater, with the cross of New Eden… no,  _Eden’s Gate_ , on it.

And there was a bullet hole right between her eyes.

Oh boy, how do you survive that one?

So that’s it. My birthday curse. I see dead people. Maybe the radiation screwed me over, or Bliss leaked into our bunker somehow. I guess I’ll never know.

I always assumed it was a reincarnation type thing, like a connection between us.

You fall. I rise.

God that sounds so stupid...

So obviously, I couldn’t tell Mom or Dad. I love them to death, but some things are better left unsaid. That I think the world is far from lonely and empty, because the stories of people nearly twenty years dead are playing out in front of me? People they knew? People they  _loved?_

Yeah, I’d rather not.

I had fun learning how to tell the difference between ghost and not-ghost.

I know that sounds messed up. But I didn’t really have anyone my age to play with. I had to make my own fun. And a secret curse, my own special super power, like in those comic books Nadine out in the junkyard used to collect? The world might have ended, but I was still a kid who wanted to be something more than I was.

Between you and me?

I still am.

And even now, I see them. I never talk to them. Ever. That’s my only rule. The more I learn about the world from the people still in it, the less I want to know about the world before.

Especially since the Highwaymen showed up. And if Mickey and Lou find out I’m a ‘rabbit with a third eye’, if I’m seen talking to  _nothing_ , there’s no chance in hell that they’ll let me stay with my family. They’ll find a way to take me, get me to use the ghosts to find them anything the preppers’ left behind that they haven’t already stolen.

Fuck that.

But I keep my list of everything I see.

Like a diary, a log. I write down what they look like, what they’re holding, doing, looking at. Where they are. How they died. Peggie or not. White sweater, red sweater, leather pants, blue jeans, masked, unmasked, tattoos, scars…  _everything_.

I just kind of feel like, we never got a chance to bury them, so this is something to remember them by. Not much, but something. And someday, when the Twins are gone, I'll ask them their names. Every single one.

Do you know, I saw a Sheriff once, when I’d strayed too far towards New Eden territory? I got in all kinds of trouble from my parents that day. I’d gotten too close. Way too close. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the Sheriff. He had these kind eyes. Tired eyes. There was a gold badge pinned on his shirt, but it was burnt and twisted by heat. A old, sort of white Stetson on his bleeding head. There were shards of glass in his face, and he was sat by the wreckage of a burnt out car like he was waiting for someone.

I wondered if he was waiting for one of the others I’d seen.

But which one? I wanted to help, but I’d seen so many. I’d guessed at so many stories and names, they all started to look the same in my head.

But I had never seen anyone like  _him_ before.

The man in the coat with the planes on it.

Sat in the grass by the old Black Horse Peak bunker, fiddling with a key on a cord around his neck. It was my first time up there. My parents had forbidden me from ever going and not told me why. I knew that New Eden had taken shelter there when the bombs had fallen, but it had been empty for years. Even the Highwaymen hadn’t claimed it. It was just…  _there._ I wanted to know what was so special about this place, why it was so unforgivable to go.

So one sunrise, I ‘borrowed’ Pastor Jerome’s ATV and drove up to it.

And there he was. All cold blue eyes, and smileless smiles, and this weird tacky jewelry. There were tattoos on his hands, strange words I couldn't understand, and three bullet holes in his chest. His right foot was resting on a skull that I could only assume was his.

When he looked at me, with this creepy almost  _recognition_ on his face, it was like the world went dark. Like I was back beneath the earth, four years old, listening to the winter raging above me. Like I could hear my Dad yelling that he'd go crazy if he had to spend any longer in that airless bunker. Like I could hear the screams of a million people as they boiled alive in the rivers, as they froze to death on the mountain sides, as they  _burned_. How could I get all that from one look?

I didn't know who he was.

I just knew I'd made a  _huge_ mistake.


	2. John

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello everyone! Thank you so much for all of your lovely comments and support and kudos and bookmarks for the first chapter! It means a lot, and I hope I can continue to entertain! Just a couple of things before getting started:
> 
> 1- This is the first POV chapter from John. This isn't really a plot developing chapter, just a character exploration of where he's at right now, but after this, plot things start to happen, I promise, no more setting the scene haha! 
> 
> 2- Oh boy, John is so hard to write!
> 
> 3- A lot of this chapter talks about a theory that I wrote on Tumblr last year, where I discussed whether John was tortured by his parents because he is left handed. Not going to lie, it feels a little bit like I'm blowing my own trumpet, but I wanted to explore it in fanfic as well as in the meta that I wrote, so I've stuck with it, plus I think it's going to make for some interesting conversations with Carmina later.
> 
> 4- I will adjust the tags, but there is a brief reference to suicidal thoughts in here, so just a heads up.
> 
> Have fun inside John's head!

When my parents first told me I was going to Hell, I cried.

I was six years old.

I cried at _everything._

And they beat me for it. For telling lies. For my vanity. For defiling the act of confession with my arrogance and pride _._ For _daring_ to believe myself innocent. They hit my head into a kitchen cupboard, over and over again, as though it might detach some satanic parasite from my brain. They stood on my fingers to break them. They took a lash to my back, _year_ upon _year_ upon _year,_ until I was old enough to hold the leather myself.

The hundredth time they screamed it at me, I realised that they were right.

You see, I was born _cursed_.

Anointed with brimstone as I grew inside my mother, so that when at last I entered the world, to breathe the corrupted air, unplanned and unwanted, I was already forsaken. As I clawed my way out, as I purged what little strength she had left, I took my dear Mother’s soul with me. I left her empty. Apathetic. Standing like Lot’s wife, gazing at Sodom. _Useless_.

So it was my brother, Jacob, who noticed my affliction first. After a particularly violent beating with my biological father’s belt, I was drawing on the wall of a closet I used to hide in.

The crayon was in my left hand.

He knew it was the sign of the devil. At least, that is how our father would have seen it. An attestation of my fallen soul. It was the mark of those _unworthy_ of Heaven. Had ‘Old Mad Seed’ discovered the truth, I doubt I’d have lived beyond infancy. And so Jacob took careful pains to conceal it. My ever noble brother. I have never told him so, but he was the first to teach me how to lie, how to hide what lay beneath. From the way he smiled at the grocery store clerks as he stuffed candy in his pockets. Or the way he took the blame for whatever sin Father dearest decided we had committed that day.

Once we were separated, and I was alone, there was no one to hide my transgressions for me.

That is when my new parents told me what awaited me.

And it wasn’t _fair._

It didn’t matter what I did. It didn’t matter how many times I bled myself in the name of absolution. How many needles I’d put in my arm. How many times I let men beat me. How many judges I whored myself out to. How many prayers and apologia I choked out. It didn’t matter if I looked men in the eye and promised them nothing I intended to give.

It didn't matter what I fucking _wanted._

Satan had claimed me.

God was blind to me and my sins.

And I _hated_ it. How many fathers must one boy have before one finally listens? Why should _I_ go to great lengths to preserve my immortal soul, when God was indifferent to my suffering, deaf to my prayers for salvation? When He, like hundreds of those _righteous_ at my parents’ church _,_ had just watched me bleed into the shirt on my back?

My soul was wretched and so _I_ would be wretched. My body, a temple of vice, easily succumbing to temptation. I finally saw why they looked at me with such loathing, I saw why I was truly _deserving_ of all that pain. And the mask I crafted myself to hide it all… it fit a little too well. It felt _good._

But I hated all that I was and I knew God did too.

Or so I thought.

Because then, Joseph found me. He told me that God had named me _worthy_ . That Reckoning was rearing her head and that I had been chosen to be saved. To enter a garden and finally find peace. To join a new family, where I would love and be loved in return. To stand atop a mountain and watch the world _burn_.

I was not lost.

I was _welcome_ at the right hand of the prophet.

And that was my final thought, as I bled out in the dirt.

Well, that and just how _filthy_ I was.

It was _hardly_ the end I'd imagined for myself.

I’d never expected to die this young. I knew I’d never be old- I had deficiencies from childhood malnourishment, a barely functioning liver and a voice in my head that told me to walk into the river and not walk back out again. But my time on God’s earth had been so fraught with pain that I assumed something else, something _better_ , would surely come to me.

After all, that is what Joseph _promised_ me.

And yet, there I was, dying in a puddle. My lungs filling with blood, my plane reducing to ashes in the forest somewhere, my hair and jacket sodden with mud. This _Deputy_ , Joseph’s new _favourite,_ had gone to great lengths to ensure I left the world just as unwanted as when I had entered.

Even at the end, I was reminded of my curse, of how I lived in the shadows with no real hope of salvation. With the last of my strength, I’d held the Deputy with my cursed left hand, cast aside all effort of hiding it. You can’t hide from God, after all. Nor can you hide from his harbinger, his _Lamb_. I took my last breath embracing what I was, experiencing the last touch of human flesh with the cause of my torment, of my suffering for all of those years.

Accepting what I’d known all along.

Joseph’s faith couldn’t save me.

Hell looked _irritatingly_ like Hope County.

I suppose I should have known. It always had been a cesspool of drunkards, idiots, and testicle eating infidels. There’s a special circle of Hell reserved for anyone named Drubman _,_ and Lucifer probably has a dog kennel with _Charlemagne Boshaw_ carved into it, just _waiting_ beside his throne. But was I to spend eternity with the spectral forms of these _buffoons_? After everything I had endured, was _this_ really the Hell they created for me?

Only, I watched a very much alive Deputy Hudson clamber out of my bunker, my silent executioner following not far behind.

I watched the fireworks over Fall’s End.

I knew what they were for.

I watched the bombs fall and the sky illuminate with righteous fire, come to cleanse the world of sinners. I saw my brothers and sisters stampeding into the safety of the Gate, and I saw far fewer leave when the salting of the earth had at last come to an end.

It is somewhat liberating, almost _arousing_ , to see yourself laid bare, vulnerable, to the violence of nature, the greatest forceful hand of all, and to know that you do not suffer. I found that if I attempted to stray from where my mortal remains lay rotting, I would inexplicably find myself back where I had started. Back to where I could sit and see myself return to soil. Time seemed to have no meaning in what now passed for my existence. Days passed like years, and years passed like days.

The New Eden blossomed around me. For me. _Within_ me.

And now this child was standing before me.

A girl, probably of about 16, with eyes I immediately knew. A perfect reflection of her parents, standing proud and unafraid like her mother had always sought to do, but there was a rough warmth only her father could have given her.

Oh, I knew them too well.

I wondered if their sins manifested within her too. If, even beyond the veil, I would finally get the chance to truly cut the confession from a fucking _Rye._

But she _looked_ at me.

Not _through_ me, as countless others had done, even when I was truly a part of this earth, but our gazes met, a deeply human connection that I had not experienced since perishing atop this cursed mountain. She looked at me without pity, without hatred, without judgement. Like I wasn't an abomination upon God's earth, a monster forged in a harlot’s womb, or at the hands of sinners who thought themselves pure.

She _saw_ me.

And so I did the only thing I knew how to do.

The only thing I could to cast aside this sensation of feeling naked, exposed as a lost, unwelcome soul, _not even good enough for Hell_ , after all my rhetoric, all my faith _._

Talk.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, there we go! Next time on 'Icarus and Styx'... DIALOGUE AND PLOT.
> 
> I just really hope I managed to get John's character right, at least to some degree. He really is quite tricky to pin down- it's amazing how you can be obsessed with a character and still not know how to write him! I think I went a bit overkill on the italics to try and capture that drawl of his, but ah well hahaha
> 
> You can follow me on Tumblr at unclefungusthegoat!
> 
> Take care!  
> Chloe x


	3. Carmina

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey all! Apologies that this is almost a week late, I've been working in Belgium, distracted by playing RDR2, crying over Avengers Endgame and then just have generally been really lazy hahaha
> 
> But, here it is! It's VERY long, much longer than the first two, and so I'm sorry if it's a bit much, but I had a lot to write, plus this is their first meeting, so I had a lot of basic stuff to cover. I'm not entirely happy with it, and I'm not sure why, but ah well, I need to move on hahaha
> 
> Hope you enjoy anyway!

“Then the eyes of both of them were _opened_ , and they knew that they were naked.”

At first, I thought he was singing.

The words that came out of his mouth were so weird and they rose and fell so easily, it was like music. Like the voices that come off the mountains, that belong to the ancient souls of the wind and rocks and trees. But as his story went on, I realised he was quoting God at me. I’ve never really understood the concept of God… not Uncle Hurk’s kind of disturbing monkey god, or the one from Pastor Jerome’s Bible, and _definitely_ not New Eden’s. From what I’ve heard, God is meant to be love. There’s no love in bombing innocent people, or in thinking you’re more special than everyone else. I’ve seen more than enough people who think they’re above the rest of us to know that.

The ghost stood slowly. He was a lot shorter than I thought he’d be, and young, early 30s maybe, not exactly the most imposing of people, but there was still something about him that really put me on edge.

“Now... the serpent was more _crafty_ than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made.”

Was he the serpent, or was I?

By the way he was stalking towards me, I took a wild guess at _him_. He had left the spot by what I had assumed to be his bones, and was quickly coming up on standing right in front of me.

My hand twitched towards the .38 I had stashed earlier.

“The serpent said to the woman ‘You _surely_ will not _die_.”

Some part of me wanted to run back down the hill to the stolen ATV and forget I ever disobeyed my parents. If I had to, could I run through him? Can you punch ghosts? Would my gun actually any use at all? But my heart told me I had no reason to be afraid. This was _my_ world. I was the one with my ankles still feeling the dew on the grass, with the wind in my hair. He couldn’t hurt me.

Could he?

His fingers searched my face, never touching me, but sort of skimming over it, and this unsettling smile came over him, like the cat in _Alice In Wonderland_. It was as if he was devouring every inch of me, and I half expected to see his tongue come flicking out to see what I tasted like.

I felt like such a child, as if I was staring at the darkness under my bed and imagining every horrible mutated thing that could be hiding underneath it. For me, it had always been the blissed out wolves I could hear from the north. I thought they were going to drag me out from under the blankets, off into the still burning forests, and tear me to pieces like they do with the jack rabbits and the squirrels and the children who stray too far from home.

Hell, I saw it happen once.

The screams of that kid being eaten were like nothing I'd ever heard before. He’d begged for his mommy, practically vomited his lungs out, he'd been crying so hard, until he suddenly fell into this terrifying silence. And his Mom had let out this howl when she’d found what was left of him, like her own throat was being ripped out.

I’d never want to hear that coming from my parents.

And so ghost or no ghost, I decided I’d totally kick his ass if he tried anything.

OK, so yeah, he probably wasn't going to _eat_ me. But if he went to snap my neck, or wrestle my gun from my grip, or put his hands in places they shouldn't be wandering, he'd get a junkful of the old Rye family fisticuffs.

I suddenly realised he was _still_ talking.

“For God knows that in the day you eat from it, your eyes will be _opened_ , and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

Oh _shit_. Had he read my mind?

He was standing over me, slightly too close, and I felt a cold haze start to wash over me.

“Which do you see in me?”

Wait, had I misinterpreted? I had been so caught up in thoughts of being consumed whole by this guy, that I hadn’t really been listening. The music of his voice was lulling me into daydreams, like I really _was_ the serpent, and he was charming me into a sense of ease and trust and security, making me dance before him.

He was staring at me again.

Soulless icy blue eyes.

Just… waiting.

My time to shine, I guess.

“... Huh?”

Perfect. First contact with the dead and I sound like my Dad when Mom had to explain to him that having a ‘nuclear winter’ doesn’t mean you get to celebrate Christmas every month. To be fair, he’d only asked because he wanted to make me a mobile with little planes on it for my crib, and was worried that he wouldn’t have enough time to carve it before the first 'Nuclear Christmas’.

The ghost let out a breathy laugh.

“I see I’ll have to take this slowly for you.”

He opened his hands out, and gesticulated at me, as if explaining to a child.

“You are the only one who has come here, to this mountaintop, to this… _purgatory_ , and actually _seen_ me, seen my wayward soul. There have been no others, not one, in what... sixteen years? And so it occurs to me that God has clearly given you knowledge, chosen you to see those of us who walk between worlds.”

His eyes shone with wonder at me, as if he was staring at some holy miracle.

“And just like Eve who ate from the Tree, and saw all the world and its evils, you have been given _sight._ You see those who have not yet reached Heaven, no doubt because God intends for you to be his judge. So…”

I didn’t think he could get any closer to me, but somehow he managed it. His voice was low in my ear, but there was this fragility, this uncertainty, that made me feel like he was afraid of the answer.

“I’ll ask again. Pass judgement upon me. Which do you see? Good or evil?”

Now that was _definitely_ something monsters didn’t ask. I wanted to open my mouth and tell him ‘evil, _all_ the way. Good guys don’t tell you creepy stories about naked people and serpents and invade the personal space of someone they just met… well, except for maybe Uncle Hurk, but he’s just a hugger.’

But I stopped.

I could tell it wasn’t a question I could choose not to answer. There was something else behind why he wanted to know.

He was… _lost._

All this talk of God, and here he was, still wandering the earth that he had been promised an escape from. Just left watching the world go to shit, when he’d probably thought something better was going to come. It feels weird to say it, but in that moment, I _envied_ him. What I would give for some sort of _faith,_ a hope that our home can be protected, and my family kept safe, and then the chance to just be _free_ somewhere out there in the expanse of space and time.

I didn’t want to crush what little hope he had left.

But I couldn’t lie. It wouldn’t be fair. I believe in honesty, _kindness,_ even if sometimes it hurts. And so, I took a deep breath and hoped with all I had that Uncle Sharky’s insistence that ghosts could reach in through your chest and rip out your heart while it was still beating was all bullshit.

“Neither.”

OK, that was _definitely_ not the answer he wanted.

“ _What_?”

“I’m sorry… I can see you, but I don't _know_ you. I’m not gonna ‘pass judgement’ on you if I have no idea who you are.”

Did he look… _offended?_ How could I possibly know who he was? Was he famous? Like, was he an outlaw once and thought he'd live on in infamy, or like we'd sing songs about him? Was this that Clutch Nixon guy who Bean once told me was a total badass? Who was this guy?

Weird thing was, now that I looked closer at him, I truly felt like I’d met him before. I hadn’t, I couldn’t have, but there was something about the intensity in his stare, and that careful way he spoke, almost like an actor.

“Why is it that you can see me then?” He hissed.

Shit. I’d pissed him off.

“I have no idea. I just can. I can see all of you.”

His eyes flickered away for a moment, as if suddenly afraid that we were being watched.

“All? What do you mean _all?”_

“There's hundreds of you. All over the county. Ghosts, I mean. Everywhere. Why…?”

I felt my stomach drop.

“Did you think you were the only one?” I asked him softly.

His eyes were glossy with the realisation.

“Yes... yes, I did.” He murmured.

His brow furrowed and frowned, as he processed what I’d just told him. I could see him turning it over in his head, as he fixated on the wilderness around us, as if waiting to see someone appear from out between the trees. I felt confidence rise in my chest.

I had always wanted to help these lost spirits, and now I _could_. He could the first one I could give some peace to, to help guide him through this existence and onto the next maybe? I could make him feel not so alone.

I didn’t know how I was going to do it, but I knew I had to try.

“What’s your name?”

He seemed seemed slightly irritated again, but answered me anyway.

“John.”

“Awesome. Nice to meet you John. I’m Carmina.”

His eyes narrowed with dark amusement, and a derisive sniff escaped him _._

“Of _course_ you are.”

What the hell was that supposed to mean? Did Carmina translate to ‘moron’ in Douchebag? He clearly thought I was an idiot. Then again, just looking at him, he was obviously the sort of person who thought _everyone_ was an idiot.

I decided to carry on.

“Do you have a last name?”

Maybe I could use it to find his family? Maybe I knew them?

“Yes. More than one. Neither of which feel truly right.”

He didn’t elaborate on this.

“Were you… married?”

He laughed again, but his smile didn’t reach his eyes. What was this guy’s deal? Why was he so reluctant to let me know anything about him? Did he not trust me?

“So, I take it those three bullet holes finished you off, huh?” I gestured at his chest, awkwardly changing the subject.

“That, amongst other things.” He drawled.

“Like what?”

He held his hands out in front of him, palms facing to the sky, and I saw what I thought had just been dirt, was actually also ash. _Burns,_ from searing hot metal… and rope burns from a parachute.

“Like Icarus, sometimes I like to fly too close to the sun. Icarus wasn’t _shot_ out of the sky _,_ of course, but I find we had a lot in common. We each had a set of beautiful wings until we decided not to listen to our Father. Then we found ourselves clipped and on fire, melting in the heat. My brother would have called it _hubris_. No doubt he did, after it all.”

Shot out of the sky? He was a _pilot_?

“Your plane crashed?”

“Irritating, isn’t it? I’d spent _weeks_ maintaining her in preparation for the Collapse. She was the finest plane in the whole county, the whole _Northwest,_ and then that motherfucking _Deputy_ filled her with holes-”

“I haven’t seen any wreckage around here… what model was she?”

“AdjudiCor FBW.” He declared, pride all over his face.

I’d seen pictures… that girl was a _beauty._

And, according to my dad, expensive as _hell._

Great, so he was a _rich_ , smug douchebag.

“... And you haven’t found any wreckage here, _Carmina_ , because I didn’t go down with her. This is simply where I was hunted down and finished off.”

My heart leapt. First of all, I wish I hadn’t told him my name, the way it dripped off of his tongue was seriously unsettling. But also… who hated this guy so much to shoot him out the damn sky, and then land to _double check_ that he was dead?

“They _hunted_ you down?”

I saw his fingers move to probe the bullet wounds in his side. I wondered if it pained him, even in death.

“Oh, quite _persistently_.”

“And they just… left you here in the dirt?”

He was covered in mud, patches of it speckled across his cheeks and neck and hands. He rubbed at it a little as he spoke.

“My unmarked grave. Shallower than shallow. My executioner wasn’t exactly one for _dignity_ in death, if there is such a thing. But, in retrospect, I was _somewhat_ spared humiliation… I wasn’t tied to the back of a pickup truck and dragged through the streets, or torn to shreds by an angry mob.”

He casually flicked some of the dirt away from under his fingernails, although it made no difference.

“Or disemboweled and strung up over Fall’s End, like they so _wanted_ to.”

Holy _shit_ , I’d heard the fighting before the bombs was brutal, but nothing could have prepared me for finally learning about it like this. What kind of _monster_ would want to hurt someone in so many awful ways?

“Who were they?”

“Excuse me?”

“The one you said shot you down?”

His head tilted at me, his face basically in my face, and that amusement was back, like he found the whole thing weirdly hilarious.

“You really don’t know?”

“...Should I?”

God, I wished he would stop staring at me like that, like there was something he knew that I didn’t, and that he had no intention of telling me anytime soon.

“I _assumed_ you would.”

“I don't know who _you_ are, why would I know who killed you?”

“Pride… loyalty... sentimentality…”

“What are you talking about?”

“I really thought they would have made me the monster in all your bedtime stories-”

“OK, I’ve had it with this-”

“- tales of their _heroics-”_

_“Just fucking tell me-”_

“It’s not my job to counter your apparent ignorance-”

“Who were they?” I demanded.

“ _Why does it matter_ ? Aren’t you here for _me?_ ” He spat back, his voice raising in anger, a mad glint in his eyes that I didn’t want to push any further.

And I wanted to punch myself. I’d been so stupid. No wonder John didn’t trust me, why he thought I was an idiot. I’d known him for two minutes and already was asking all the uncomfortable questions. Just because the guy was dead, didn't give me the right to poke around in his personal shit.

I guess I'd just wanted to know if it had been someone I knew who shot him. The wounds weren't clean, so definitely not Aunt Grace, but… I'd literally just met him. I had no right to ask.

“Yeah, I guess… sorry, I didn't mean to pry…”

“Don’t lie to me, Carmina.” The smirk was back, although still with a dangerous edge.

“Well… yeah, OK, I did, but you don’t have to answer my questions if you don’t want to.”

“Who said I didn't want to answer?”

“You, when you asked if it mattered who shot you?”

“I’m very willing to cooperate, my dear.” He was toying with me, testing me, and I hated it. I didn't want to play this stupid game.

“Then you’ll answer my questions?”

“I didn't say that either, darling.”

I heard the frustration rise in my voice.

“Look I’m trying to help you here, but I don’t have to, so you can either tell me or not. It doesn’t matter and actually, if you’re going to be like that, I don't really care.”

I _did_ care. I had set my heart on helping these people and for that, I needed to know what happened to every single one of them. Find a way to help. I’d made a _promise_ to myself, given myself a purpose. I’d broken my only rule, but there was no one around, no one to turn me over to the Twins. And so I’d be fucked if I was just going to walk away from the very first one I talked to just because he happened to be an asshole.

“Easily riled. Demanding unearned respect. _Prideful_.Interesting...”

I cut him off before he could ramble on anymore.

“Listen, John-”

He silenced himself, and took to staring at me intently again.

“Oh, I’m _listening_.”

I took a deep breath before starting, trying to calm myself down.

“It doesn’t matter what you did, or who shot you, or why, and it doesn’t matter what happened here. Nobody deserves to be punished like this. Left alone, I mean, in between everything, out of sight. Maybe _that’s_ why I’m here. To be a friend and help you move on to a better place. To save you.”

That smile again, dead behind the eyes.

“A nice sentiment, darling, but the time for someone to save me has _long_ passed.”

“That’s not true.”

“Isn’t it? Is it not true that there comes a day when people are so consumed by their vices, so unable to fully commit their bodies to atonement, so numb to the pain it requires to strip the soul of sin, they stop being _worth_ saving?”

I could have kicked myself for not putting it all together sooner.

The talk of God, of ‘The Collapse’ and now of atonement, the scars and the tattoos. He’d been shot out of the sky, but died in front of an Eden’s Gate bunker.

He’d probably been running for cover.

He was a _Peggie._

No _wonder_ he didn’t seem to want anything to do with me.

Only, he didn't look like any other Peggie ghost I'd ever seen?

“Carmina?”

I was still the serpent, dancing to his music. I almost felt _compelled_ to answer him. I don’t know what it was. I just… had to.

“No. I don’t believe that.”

“Really?” He seemed unsurprised. “You truly can’t think of _anyone_ who deserves nothing less than death?”

Of course I could, but just the very acceptance of that truth made me feel almost ashamed. Did my parents really raise me to want people dead, without giving them a second chance, an opportunity for redemption? I didn’t want to admit it, but, in a way... yes. They’d never wanted that for me, but that was just the world we lived in. The way things had to be when people like the Twins were around. We had to survive, to protect the ones we loved, and sometimes, people get hurt for it.

“I can. Yes.” I confessed.

The final word sparked something victorious in his eyes.

“ _Honesty_ , at last.”

He backed away a little, and I felt I could finally breathe again.

“And in knowing that, you know who I am. What I was to the world, even to my own family. You know why you won’t be able to help me.”

“Your family? The other Peggies?”

He continued to ramble at me.

“Families are the ones who know us best. They illuminate our failures with their successes. They see the darkness in us that others are blind to, because they themselves often sowed those seeds within us.”

He stopped a moment, as if weighing up whether to say what he said next.

“Surely you see it in your own… in your _parents_ , perhaps?”

I didn't like where he was going with this.

I felt like he was pushing me, agitating me on purpose, seeing if I would act out.

 _Why_?

“My parents are good people. They built Prosperity from almost nothing, they gave everyone a home again. Hope County wouldn't have survived without them.” I warned him, daring him to say another word that suggested my Mom and Dad were anything like whatever shitty family he’d come from.

He rolled his eyes at me _._

“Hope County perished in the first place _because_ of people like them.”

“What the _FUCK_ is that supposed to mean?”

“Oh, there's wrath beneath that pretty face too! People who refused to listen, Carmina! Who refused to hear the word of God, who ignored our warnings and decided that they had the right to tear down everything we had built. People like Earl Whitehorse, and Eli Palmer and that _Deputy_ . Like your parents, Miss _Rye_.”

My blood froze in my veins.

“You… you know my family?”

He was up in my face again, his not-quite-there fingers lifting up my chin so he could look right into the storm brewing in my eyes.

“Oh yes, _very_ well. So well, that I recognised you almost immediately. Your mother always was a beautiful woman. You were lucky to take after her. Shame you got your father’s brains.”

If I hadn't already realised that I was on dangerous ground, this would have been the part where I would have decided that this guy was the wrong ghost to mess with. My parents had never mentioned a ‘John’ to me, _ever,_ especially not one who was a _pilot,_ and now I had a thousand different theories as to why running through my head.

I pulled away from his touch.

“My Mom and Dad fought against New Eden because you did terrible things in the name of your God. You set the bombs off.”

He _laughed._

 _“_ If you believe that, my dear, you are more naive than I had assumed. Joseph simply saw what was to come, and brought it into the light, for all to see.”

Oh, you bet I’d caught sight of the bloody scar carved into his chest, peeking out from where his shirt was so dramatically unbuttoned. It was pretty damn hard to believe his denials when some Peggie had clearly literally cut into him as part of one of their sick rituals, like the one that had left Dad with his scar.

“Wait…!”

He looked triumphant again, and without warning, his hands lashed out and grabbed my shoulders. His touch was cold, and almost weightless, like how I'd imagine it feels to walk amongst the stars in the lonely abyss of space, but there was definitely a sense of… _life._

“... did you just say _New Eden?”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks guys for reading and for your continued support! I hope it was worth the wait?
> 
> I've finally done a basic plan for the whole fic now, and worked out the whole thing should be about 25 chapters long. This may change, but I will definitely endeavour to get it all done!
> 
> Remember, you can follow me on Tumblr at unclefungusthegoat!
> 
> See you next time!  
> Chloe x


	4. John

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello all, and welcome back! Thank you again for all of your wonderful support, it's so kind of you to be leaving so many comments and kudos, and it means a lot!
> 
> I just thought I'd let you know that I've made a Spotify playlist for this, that I add more songs to occasionally! So if you feel like giving it a listen, it's called Icarus and Styx and can be found here: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3RAm071fs83TIeD3VUayNf
> 
> Have fun everyone!

Carmina Rye may have inherited her mother’s spirit and striking looks, but her brain was _obviously_ her father’s. Misguidedly well meaning, quick to hostility, dull around the edges, stubborn to the last. Nick never had been the sharpest mind, and the prospect that he was _still_ thundering through the skies in that migraine inducing rustbucket was _infuriating_.

That he named his _daughter_ after it was even more so.

Still, I was fascinated by her.

Wrath moved through her, and the pride with which she had addressed me, as if she was _worthy_ of my immediate respect and trust, as if she was _vital_ to my very existence, was almost hypnotic. But what surprised me most was her ignorance concerning, well, _me._ I had assumed I would be her Big Bad Wolf, the shadow-man she had fought in every bedtime story, allowing her to grow in strength of character, and strength of conviction.

I can only surmise that in an attempt to shelter her from their own evils, they had hidden me. Buried the bones, as it were.

That aside, she had already proved herself useful.

When your world is narrowed to a single hilltop, an unchanging horizon, and a solitary existence, context is unbearably difficult to come by. Of course, I'd seen the heathens on their quad bikes with their neon helmets, come to tag the walls with their lacklustre scribbles. All blobbed uninspiringly in one colour,  _fuchsia_ no less, and they couldn’t even cover a whole _wall_ before they lost interest. Pathetic imitations of insurrection with no higher purpose, or drive.

Oh, _I_ could have taught them a thing or two about rebellion. Try savouring your first taste of another man, feeling him buried deep inside you, silently fucking in the confessional, when your parents are stood at the pulpit, spouting hatred for the Sodomites and their ‘agenda’.

Yes, I had seen those Highwaymen turn away from my Gate, thinking it unfit for their slothful, wasteful ways. I knew they ran rampant around what was left of the county.

But, _there it was._

Slipping out from her so casually, like it had always been there, always been a part of her world.

Joseph would say that my faith had wavered, and as usual, his perception would prove to be right. I had heard and seen nothing of the Project for so long that I had started to doubt if our glorious Eden had ever actually come to be. It is one thing for the world to _look_ beautiful. It’s another to know that pain and suffering were at an end, sin ripped from the hearts of the lustful and the gluttonous and the prideful, and mankind remade as the angels God intended us to be.

Just as Joseph had intended us to be.

I grasped at her shoulders, allowing myself very little time to be surprised that I could actually touch her and not pass straight through. I needed to see the truth of it in her eyes. I needed to see just what the state of things were after so long, whether animosity lingered, if everyone had continued to slaughter each other even after the bombs had fallen.

Were my brothers still alive?

“...did you just say _New Eden?”_

She tried to pull away slightly, evidently uncomfortable under my grip, but I could not let go, not yet.

“I’m not answering anything until you tell me how you know my parents!”

“And I won’t answer _that_ unless you answer _me_ . What did you mean _New Eden_?”

“Why haven’t my parents ever told me about you? Who are you… what did you _do_ to them?”

Reluctantly, I knew this was a battle I wasn’t going to win. Though I had all the time in the universe, never ageing, never decaying, I didn’t have time to stand and argue with this _child._

I _had_ to know.

I didn’t even have to lie. _Obviously_ I had no intentions of sharing the somewhat _turbulent_ history I shared with Nick and Kim. I wasn’t going to admit I was the one who’d given her father that scar she’d no doubt seen, that some of the blood that covered me, even now, was _his._ Nor would I deign to humiliate myself and explain that after a particularly heated encounter during which they’d _yet again_ refused to commit themselves to the Project, I’d encouraged a few of my Chosen to spread rumour that Kim had been less than _faithful_ to her marriage vows _._

But there was an utterable half-truth in what had long passed.

I finally released my grip on her, aware my wrath was starting to boil up inside of me, and manifest itself within my fingers.

“It’s a small county, Baby Rye. Everyone knows everyone. And your parents and I were friends... until we weren’t.”

I let a smile pass across my face, tinged with just the right concoction of longing, of nostalgia, of the loss of a time gone by, to seem genuine.

“Your father even taught me how to fly. I’d wanted to pilot since I was a child, long nights alone staring at the stars, and he helped that become a reality for me. He was kind to me. Not many others have been.”

Carmina’s face softened, the loyal frown dissipating into the air, and I knew I had her again.

“You were friends?”

“Yes.”

“Until the cult?”

I couldn’t keep the exhaustion out of my voice.

“The word ‘cult’ is so… _demeaning_. We’re not a cult, we’re a _family_. But… yes. The Father too was kind to me. He _saved_ me. And your parents couldn’t understand it.”

She took a moment to settle on the notion that her parents hadn’t ever mentioned me because we no longer had any relationship when I had died, and then _finally_ decided that she would answer my question.

“New Eden live in the north, near the fallout zone in the Whitetails. They’re a luddite colony of sorts, no technology, or weaponry as such. We don’t see much of them anymore, they keep to themselves and we keep to ours.”

“They built their garden?”

“I don’t know… I guess? I’ve never been.”

“And Joseph?”

“You mean Joseph Seed?”

Honestly, it was like trying to talk to Jacob when he hadn't had any coffee in the morning. Lumbering and dragging my way through the conversation, every detail having to be spelled out because apparently caffeine equates to cognition when you’re someone who'd happily wipe your ass with ferns and cook roadkill and you’d sooner throw everything to the wind and live as a wolf rather than take a goddamn _shower_.

“No, _obviously_ , I mean the _other_ one...”

She wrinkled her nose at me, just like her mother used to do.

“Hey, don't sass me John, I'm _trying_ to help you here. If you're wondering if he's still alive… yes, he is, and he’s still their leader… sorry, their Father.” She corrected herself.

No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t imagine what he looked like now.

“He must be an old man...” I hadn’t cried in _years_ , but somehow the image of my brother suddenly so old, made me want to bawl like an infant. He had never been a child to me, almost a teenager when I was born. Never a young man, already heading forty when we were reunited. Now, once again, my brother had aged without me beside him. And I had no way of ever truly knowing what came between.

It was like he was a half-finished oil painting, one that I couldn’t ever complete.

But, as I had done so, oh so many times before, I held it within me.

“Yeah. But, don’t worry, we haven’t had word to say he’s ill or anything! I think he’s OK-” Carmina soothed as she attempted to comfort me.

“And his Heralds?”

“Heralds?”

At this rate, _she’d_ probably age and turn to dust before this conversation ended.

“There are _others_ in charge, _yes_?”

“Oh… well, he has a ward or a son or something who sort of takes over sometimes. And there's this person they call The Judge. I hear they don't really say much and never leave Joseph's side. They’re his protector.”

 _Jacob._ He would be nearing 70 years old by now, but I knew he had to be flourishing in this visceral new world order, the weak having perished in the famines that sapped the last of their strength, and the men who ordered him to die in their wars having been flayed of their flesh by a fire of their own design.

That, and he was hardly one for imaginative titling.

I admit, I felt excruciatingly _alone_ at the notion of my brothers together, after all this time, pursuing their paradise without me. Not long after Joseph gave me the burden of baptism, he carved ‘Envy’ into my back, knowing that I seethed with regret at having not been born sooner, with wishes that the age difference had not been so great between us, that I may have had some semblance of what it felt like to grow up with brothers. They always had been close. They had an understanding, a shared experience that I would never truly be a part of.

They remembered our dear Mother when she still spoke, our Father when he drank only half a bottle in the morning. They no doubt had secrets and pacts, games I never knew of, drawings etched into the backyard fence of them together, unburdened by a helpless infant who they became brother, father and mother to.

They had spent so long without me before.

It must have been _easy_ for them to readjust after I was dead.

Perhaps I had finally been replaced...

“Is Faith still with him, or did he tire of her, like the others?”

She frowned.

“Sorry, I don't know any ‘Faith’.”

Well, there was some comfort in that. The bitch was dead too, and the whole charade finally at an end. My brother needed a great many things, but a _sister_ was never one of them. She was a vanity of his, though I never dared say it, a pet who would bolster his ego when the faithful did not sing quite loud enough.

I sang louder than all of them.

And time and time again, I was cut into, the skin on my back separated because it was never enough, _I_ was never enough.

He never cut her.

Not once.

“Tell me about the Garden. How many live there? Do they still baptise their members, or take confessions? Has Joseph written more of his Word, to tell of the bombing and the martyrs we made of ourselves?”

She just shrugged.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know."

“How many more submitted to the glory of the Project when they saw that Joseph was right? Do they accept him as a Prophet of God?”

“If anyone accepted him as that, they’re up there with him-”

“But _who?_ Who _finally_ saw the light, embraced what we enlightened had _all_ known to be true?”

God, I wanted to revel in knowing just _who_ had finally learned what saying YES can do, who had admitted their sins and _atoned_ for what they did to us.

“Look, I was just a child when we got out of the bunkers…”

“Oh, and my _ranch_? Did he or Jacob ever claim it back from the Resistance?”

“Seriously, one question at a time- who the hell is Jacob…?”

“Is it just America, or is the whole world affected by the bombs?”

“I don’t know-”

“Does the Word of Joseph reach beyond this county?”

“I don’t know-”

I threw my hands up in exasperation and for the first time in many years found myself craving a cigarette to ease the headache I had growing in my temples.

This child was so annoying, she could give the dead a _migraine._

“Is there anything you actually _do_ know?”

The wrath that I so excruciatingly endeavoured to bury deep within myself was starting to claw its way to the surface again, and with the raising of voices once more, hers was doing the same, flushing in her freckled face.

“Well, I apparently still know a fuckload more than _you_ , since you’re asking me all these questions. I want to help you John, but you need to slow down-” Carmina spat at me, backing away.

“I’ve been _dead_ for well over a decade, darling, in case you’d forgotten.”

“It’s not like you’ve not been _right here_ though-”

“Oh yes, I get _so many_ visitors here, it’s a veritable _hive_ of conversation, especially since _all_ of them have the uncanny ability to talk to the dead.”

She turned away slightly, avoiding my eyeline, and ergo, having to admit that I was right.

“Ugh, if you were this damn rude when you were alive, I’m guessing people didn’t really tell you shit anyway.”

Oh, how I had missed _this_ , the sense of satisfaction that comes from _knowing_ that you are intellectually superior to your opponent. A dim-witted defendant, a clueless witness, a gullible jury, a hapless judge.

And now, Miss Teen Hope County, all beauty, no brains.

But it occurred to me that I couldn't go on like this with her.

The importance of the Project, and the role I held within it, clearly alluded her. I definitely had no intention of filling her in on the subject. And patience is a virtue I never have had much time for, and I had done more than enough waiting. Waiting to see the New Eden, to get off of this fucking mountaintop, to see my brothers again. If I continued to agitate her, to test her wrath, to poke at her pride in order to gain these answers here and now, she would no doubt abandon me, and it could be years, _centuries_ perhaps, before I could have a conversation like this again.

I had to see Joseph.

I had to see Jacob.

And _she_ had to take me there.

I had to win her back, gain her trust.

Well, her _tolerance,_ at the very least.

And yet, just as I opened my mouth to charm her, flatter her, apologise, grovel, even _beg_ , whatever it took to ingratiate myself to her, she spoke first, breaking the angry silence we had created. And I saw something in her face that I never thought I’d see again from a Rye.

_Compassion._

She turned to face me once more.

“I’m not going to fight you John.”

“I’m not going to fight you either.” I admitted.

“Good. I know it’s been a long time for you since you last spoke to anyone, so I’m cutting you some slack and assuming that you’re not such a fuckface on a regular day.”

I wasn’t sure most people would agree with that, but, as promised, I didn’t argue.

“So what do you want with me, Carmina Rye?”

“I want to help you.”

“I already said you can’t-”

“I think I can. I don’t know how to get you to... _move on_... yet, but I know there’s hope, because you’re here, and I’m here, and we’re connected somehow. I’ve been given this curse, but I don’t think it has to be a curse.”

She stepped towards me, far more confident in herself, and quietly spirited, than at any other point in this tumultuous first meeting.

“And although you’re pretty sure of it, I’m not an idiot. I’ve got smarts. And intuition. And an artillery back at Prosperity that’ll take out any Highwaymen who try to stop us.”

“Stop us from _what?”_

“Getting you to the other side. Getting you peace. Isn’t that what you want?”

I’d never wanted anything so much in my entire life. For the pain to end, for the rage in my soul to be calmed, for the shame and self-loathing I carried upon my back to be stripped away. To never have to gaze upon this wretched world again.

“And it’s not just about me helping you. You’re just the first. I made a promise to myself to help _all_ the lost spirits... even the ones who are overdressed jerks.” She smiled at me, and I couldn’t help but smile back at her oddly refreshing, rough and tumble monologuing capacity. It was definitely like being at Nick’s side again.

“So I’ll find a way for you, for all of them. I always do. It’s who I am. I make a promise, and I keep it.”

She offered her hand out to me.

“Will you let me help you?”

I barely gave it a moment’s thought. I reached and took her outstretched hand, the slightest sensation of warmth from her palm reminding me that I no longer belonged in this world.

Then again, I never had.

“Well, Carmina Rye… my answer is _yes_.”

“OK, great-”

“But first…”

I held onto her with more force, and her eyes widened a little with anticipation.

“This had better not be a request to go make up with my parents, they’d kill me if they knew I’d come here-”

“No…”

If I had a heartbeat, it would have surely betrayed my anxiety at seeing him again. The words sounded shaky on my tongue. It was time to face my failures, see what God’s Chosen made of me after all these years. Was I a martyr whose blood had watered the Garden, or a name whispered in the shadows, cast out and put to death once sin had consumed me?

“... Show me the New Eden.”

He would welcome me. His baby brother, thought lost, like I was all those years before, brought home. Never mind what he had told me so many times towards the end. That I was rushing towards a fate without love, without family.

After all, I had given my _life_ for him, just as I had sworn to do.

Was that not love?

He would forgive me… wouldn’t he?

“What?”

I smiled at her, the hope of my brother’s love overwhelming me.

“Take me to Joseph Seed.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks everyone for taking the time to read Chapter 4! I hope you enjoyed it!
> 
> This is actually the last complete chapter I had on my laptop, chapter 5 is like 75% written and chapter 6 is like 5% written so there may slight delays as I start to enter into stuff that I haven't pre-written, but, as usual, I will try my best!
> 
> As usual, you can follow me on Tumblr at unclefungusthegoat!
> 
> Take care,  
> Chloe x


	5. Carmina

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey everyone! Haha, you're going to be so sick of me apologising for these chapters being really infrequent, but I'm a slow writer (read: procrastinator) and I've spent the past few weeks working on something else Far Cry 5 based around another hobby of mine... COSPLAY!
> 
> I went to London MCM Comic Con last weekend as John, and you can see a photo here: https://twitter.com/ChloeHatherley/status/1132721653786521600! It took me 3 hours to get ready, applying the tattoos and facial hair and putting in blue contact lenses, but it was totally worth it! And Seamus actually liked it too and I can't even describe how excited I was!
> 
> Anyway, this chapter has been quite tricky to write, but it's here now! It's another really long one, so I'm about to apologise again! I just had a lot to write! 
> 
> I hope you enjoy though!

The moment the gate to Prosperity appeared on the horizon, I could see Mom and Aunt Grace waiting for me atop the wall.

It wasn’t exactly unusual for me to disappear early in the morning with no explanation. I’d always rise with the sun, and if I didn’t have responsibilities around our home- repairs to the exterior wall or power generator, laundry to help with, supplies to audit or my room to clean- I’d take off into the wilderness. Feel the sun on my face, climb a tree and fall asleep high up among the leaves, watch the bison crossing the fields. Practise my aim with some of the junk lying around, or go back to our old house and sit it what was once my room, fixing up all the model planes that I’d decided to leave behind when we’d finally abandoned it.

Just be in a place where I didn’t have to be a soldier, or a survivor, or a daughter.

But today was different. I could see Mom frowning with disappointment, and it hit me like an explosive at one of the Highwaymen’s Derbys.

_I’d missed the meeting._

Fuck. My Mom had been planning that meeting for _weeks_ and I’d just _forgotten_ about it. How could I have been so fucking irresponsible? So selfish?

All thought of John and my future visit to New Eden evaporated in an instant.

As I pulled Pastor Jerome’s ATV up to the gate, it slid open and the wait felt like an absolute lifetime. I mean, the gate is pretty damn slow on a good day, but today, it seemed to be _endless_. Every second seemed to drag by, like the machinery knew about the dressing down I was about to get (and totally deserved) and decided it would savour every moment of my humiliation. I hoped Mom would at least take it inside, so everyone didn’t have to stare at me.

“Carmina Nyoko Rye-!”

Mom came marching down the stairs to meet me as I parked. I climbed off of my stolen vehicle, unloaded my weapon and stashed it in the cache by the gate, so I could retrieve it later when I’d probably need to shoot something to cool off.

“Mom, I’m so sorry, I completely forgot…”

“Carmina…” She brought her hand to her face and rubbed her temples. I waited for her to start shouting, but it never came. “I don’t wanna hear it. I’ve told you before I expect everyone at those meetings, and you are no exception, in fact, even less so than most, seeing as it was _about you_. Where on earth have you been? And why do you have Jerome’s ATV? Does he know you have it?”

Aunt Grace appeared behind her, her ability to sneak up on you the bane of my childhood, since I lost every game of hide and seek we ever played.

“If I was a betting woman, I’d say your girl here thought it wouldn’t be missed, owing to the Pastor’s good nature and all.”

Though her voice was unreadable like usual, I could see her starting to smirk a little.

“Hey Aunt Grace.”

“Don’t you ‘hey’ me just yet, Little Rye, I’m on your Mom’s side for now. You sure as hell better have a good reason for embarrassing her like that.”

I turned back to look my Mom right in the eye, hoping that my guilt was written all over my face. She works so hard, sacrifices everything so that we can live in peace and not starve while we’re at it. I could see right now that it wasn’t really anger that had run lines deep into the furrows of her brow, silvered her hair and made her eyes dull, but _exhaustion_.

“I don’t have an excuse Mom. I’m so sorry, I should have been there, I was just… I mean…I... ”

I sighed in defeat, unable to find the words.

Obviously I couldn’t tell her what I’d really been doing, but I wasn’t going to lie to her. So I couldn’t talk about the ghosts, but I couldn’t talk about anything else, because I’d most definitely not been _doing_ anything else. Also, now was definitely not the time to bring up John. It sounded like he broke my parents' hearts. I didn’t want to reopen half-healed wounds, patched together by silence and censorship.

And just for a second, I had a terrible thought.

Was it _Dad_ who shot him out of the sky?

Was it Mom who stood over him and put those holes in his chest?

John had seemed so surprised that his murderer hadn’t told me about him. Had I spent the morning talking to a guy whose blood was on my parents’ hands?

Taking my inability to answer her as insecurity, my Mom suddenly brought me into a hug, and I pressed my face into her shoulder. She always smelt so warm, like a home within a home, and being wrapped up in her arms, soap and shotgun residue lingering on her sweater, was my favourite place in the whole world.

And I felt so fucking guilty for even starting to believe that they could have killed someone like that.

“Sweetheart, if you don’t want to go anymore, you don’t have to. Someone else can go and find Thomas Rush... I’ll ask Gina or Roger can take the Patate, or I’m sure we can try and get Sharky off of the ethanol for a couple of weeks-”

I laughed at the idea.

“Mom, he’d probably burn the guy to death before he managed to get back to the county-”

“Yeah, well I’d rather that happen that you going and getting yourself hurt-”

“I’m not scared Mom. It was my idea. I _want_ to go.”

I pulled away from her and let her adjust my hat so that it sat straight on my head again. She could never be mad at me for long, and I could tell that I was already forgiven, but she still had questions. Questions I didn’t have answers for.

“If you want to go, then why weren’t you there this morning?”

“Kiddo? That you?”

Saved again.

Dad came jogging out from the garage, covered in engine grease as usual, and proceeded to offer his hand out for our secret handshake. Ever since I got too big to be picked up and swung around, or sit on his shoulders, Dad insisted we have a routine. You name it, it’s in it- clapping, fistbumps, leapfrog, the most dad-style dancing ever seen, a couple of fingerguns, and yeah, running around in a circle with your arms out pretending to be a plane.

“I get a handshake? Even when I’m in disgrace?” I joked, aware of Mom’s eyes narrowing slightly, in her trademark mixture of disapproval and amusement.

“Disgrace is the family trademark, baby. You remember what I told you ‘bout your grandpa cussing me outta the house when I told him I wasn’t signing up to go to no war?”

Our routine was flawless, as usual.

“ _Your_ side of the family maybe,” Mom rolled her eyes, but could no longer hold back her smile. She pulled him in for a quick kiss on his sweaty face.

“Don't act like you was an angel, Kim, who was the one who got suspended from high school after that stunt you pulled at junior prom?”

“It was a protest, they wouldn't let me wear pants- also, _you helped-_ ”

“Well, somebody had to carry that barrel of barbecue sauce.” Dad flexed.

“And somebody had to watch the door while I lit the firecrackers-”

“You know, Bonnie and Clyde had nothin’ on us-”

“-Yeah, for all of the hour and a half we evaded the cops-” Mom laughed.

The story of my parents on the run from the law, drenched in barbecue sauce, was one of my favourites, but now hearing this oh so familiar story, I couldn't help but see a third figure, a shadow beside them, with John's face. Had he always been there with them, just erased from every moment, every memory because they couldn't face having to deal with knowing that they'd never said goodbye?

“Is there something wrong, sweetheart? Something you wanna talk about?” Dad gripped onto Mom, and now I had two parents and an aunt staring at me as I zoned out.

He always knew when something was troubling me.

“No Dad, I’m fine. Honestly.”

“You sure about that?” Aunt Grace tilted her head at me, unconvinced.

“ _Yes_ . Positive. If I wasn’t, I would tell you.” I smiled. It wasn’t a lie, although now that I think about it, it wasn’t really the truth either. The sudden reminder that I’d volunteered to go and find Thomas Rush and his caravan made me realise that I now had a choice to make. Help my family and travel southwest as soon as possible, like I’d promised, or stay a little while longer and keep my promise to John. Take him to _his_ family, creepy and dangerous as they might be. Find out how to save him. Free him. And maybe finally come to understand why I was cursed like this in the first place.

“Well, if you’re sure…” Mom said, still not entirely reassured, “I left the plans we made this morning on the table. Let me know if they’re OK.”

“Yeah… I’ll go look over them now. Again, Mom… I’m so sorry. It was really irresponsible of me, I should… I mean, I _do,_ know better-”

“Hey, stop apologising. What’s done is done.” She broke away from Dad and cradled my face in her hands, leaning forward to kiss me on my forehead.

“I just don’t want to let you down.”

“You never could... CarCar.”

“Mom, seriously?” I groaned.

“Hey, I thought you liked that? Besides, it’s a better nickname than… what was it the other day...?”

“Kimquat...” Dad replied sheepishly.

I snorted at the embarrassed red glow growing under the shadow of his weathered old ‘Rye and Son’s’ cap… well, ‘Rye and Daughter’. I’d sewn a really makeshift patch onto it when I was nine or ten, as a joke. It wasn’t exactly hilarious, and it fell off pretty quickly, but he still pins it on occasionally, when he feels grumpy or frustrated or tired. He says it reminds him of what’s important.

I guessed right now he was having another attempt at fixing Carmina’s wings, and needed the reminder.

“Hey, no one can say you don’t try, Dad.”

“Nah, I’ll get there someday.”

“Yeah, for someone called Nick, you really should get a grip on ‘Nick-names’...”

He gave me the softest punch on my arm, and that goofy grin we all love was back.

“I don’t want you to get there, babe” Mom moved back over to Dad, and wrapped herself around him, “You know I love the names you come up with for me. They’re one of a kind.”

“Well darlin’, _you’re_ one of a _Kim-d_ -”

“Twenty years of marriage and I think that’s the worst joke you’ve made yet…”

Mom’s voice had gone all gooey, and Aunt Grace gave me a look with just enough raising of her eyebrows to suggest that I should probably run for it before they start dragging up baby stories, where I’d stuck a screwdriver up my nose or something.

“I’ll catch you guys later- let me know if you need any help with the repairs, Dad.”

I turned and starting heading towards our home, and up to the silence of my room, where I could finally just take a moment to process everything that had happened that morning.

“Hey! Speaking of ‘CarCar’, I think Selene baked those brownies… don’t eat them!” Mom called after me, cradled in Dad’s arms again, like two lovesick teenagers.

“Will do! Uh, I mean… won’t do!”

And I practically ran inside, _anything_ to avoid more interrogation.

Though it killed me to do it, I ignored the plate of brownies that had been left in the middle of the table. God, they smelled so good… well, all things considered anyway… we’re not exactly sitting on vast amounts of chocolate in Hope County, since it had a habit of, you know, being vaporized in the heat of a nuclear detonation. So Selene adds her own… let’s call it ‘charm’... to the mixture, and judging by today’s aroma, there was probably more of the forest floor than irradiated Hershey’s Kisses in there.

Still, I hadn’t had breakfast and when you basically ate canned fish and peaches for the first six years of your life, food is food.

But instead, I forced myself to grab the plans that had been laid out flat across the table at the meeting I’d missed. A map of the east coast, fallout zones and railway routes; the info we’d managed to get on Thomas Rush and his weirdly anonymous ‘Captain’; plans for rebuilding the county- the clinic, the jail, the radio station, a couple of bridges, and what was once Fall’s End; and a step by step itinerary of how we intended to take out the Highwaymen.

“I may be blind, but I’ve known you long enough to see you’re hiding something, Little Rye.”

Embarrassingly, I squeaked at the sound of Aunt Grace’s voice, sneaking up on me yet again. She folded her arms, making it obvious that I had ‘I’m keeping a huge secret from my parents’ written all over my face.

You know, when I was about thirteen, she taught me to hunt rabbits. We were sat staring at our snare trap, the rain hammering down on us. I was soaked, forgot to bring my coat… or so I told her. It was more like I’d been beaten up by a kid who had been passing through the county with her family, and she’d stolen it. Everyone in Prosperity had rallied together to make it for me. And I felt so ashamed that I’d lost it, that I hadn’t defended myself as well as I could have.

I couldn’t admit that I’d fought back, and still lost.

She looked at me as I lied about where this coat was, my face still violet and swollen from my humiliation, and she told me that I could tell her anything I didn’t want to tell Mom and Dad. Didn’t matter what I had to say, or what time of night it was, or how many tears I cried while I did it.

I’ve never lied to her since.

I’ll never lie to her again.

“Is it that obvious?”

“Uh-huh. And your folks may not be pushing it now, but they’re gonna keep asking questions.”

I sighed, knowing exactly just how much they’d wear me down until they found out what was bothering me.

“Tell me you’re not making your own advances on the Twins.”

“Not even close.”

“You’re scouting it out though?”

OK, I admit, I had done _that_ more than once, but stopped after I nearly got a bullet through my throat for my efforts.

“Nope, not this time. Cross my heart.”

Aunt Grace’s head tilted at me.

“You got a boyfriend out there, don’t you?”

“What? No!”

“Girlfriend?”

“If I did, you’d be the first to know, Aunt Grace.”

“Why, because you’d tell me, or because I’d find out?”

“Both! Besides, who would it even be? And I swear to God, if you say Bean…”

“He _is_ quite a catch,” Aunt Grace smiled, yet still sounded deathly serious, and I couldn’t help but crack up at the idea of it. And for a moment, everything suddenly felt normal again. I was there, at home, laughing with my family. Just the way it should be.

“He said he was going to write in my WikiBeania profile that I had ‘eyes like glistening puddles of oil leaking from a generator with a soul’.”

“I’m pretty sure you just made that up-”

“I wish I had-”

“So I guess your boyfriend writes better poetry then?”

“I don’t have a-” I stopped myself. It was probably easier to let everyone  _think_ that that I was being ‘wooed’ by some mysterious figure, until I worked out how exactly to let everyone know I talk to ghosts. It wasn’t a lie. Just a secret. And the more I denied the existence of this new Romeo or Juliet, the more people would think it was true.

Hey, I can’t help it if people _assume incorrectly_ , can I?

“Look… I can’t tell you right now. It’s _not_ a guy, or a girl for that matter… anyway, I’m still working stuff out. But I’ll tell you soon. I promise.”

Aunt Grace gave me that suspicious look again.

“All right, Carmina. But you’d better not be doing something stupid.”

What, like spending the morning talking, well, _yelling,_ at an overly intense, dead behind the eyes (and just generally dead) ex-Rye family friend, who also happened to be a Peggy before he was shot out of the sky and died 17 years ago? Like promising him that I’d take him to reunite with a crazy, loincloth wearing cult leader in the remote north? Like taking the power of life and death into my hands, swearing an oath that I’d somehow be a hero, and send the souls on to whatever afterlife awaits us?

Nah, nothing stupid at all.

“Come on Aunt Grace, you know me-”

“Yeah, reckless, just like your Pops-”

“I promise, what I’m doing, it’s not stupid, or reckless. Well, not yet, anyway. It might get there. And if it does, I’ll invite you along. I know you wouldn’t want to miss it.”

Aunt Grace let out a low chuckle.

“You got that right.”

And knowing that she wasn’t going to get anything else out of me, she grabbed a brownie off of the table and turned to go.

“Better get workin’ on those plans.” She suggested, although it clearly _wasn’t_ a suggestion, and disappeared back through the door to go and rejoin my parents, who were still canoodling in the morning light.

I took the stairs two at a time.

And when I had closed my bedroom door, I let the weight of worlds fall on me.

The living and the dead.

I’d always wanted responsibility. My Mom is the strongest person I know, and I’d grown up watching her holding everything together, watching her keep everyone alive, organise rations, scavenger groups, sleeping arrangements, re-establishing some kind of society from basically nothing. I promised myself that as soon as I could, I would take some of the burden from her.

But I didn’t want this.

I didn’t want to have to _choose_.

Dropping the plans onto the nearest free surface, and dodging all of Selene’s stuff that she’d just left out across the floor of our shared room- hair pins, scrunched up papers, candy wrappers, and empty vials- I crossed to where my bed sat under the window so I could see the stars, and crashed down onto it.

And I reached for the little tin model airplane I kept on the windowsill. When we’d moved to what eventually became Prosperity, there was an old ranch here that had partially collapsed after the bombs. I’d been climbing on it, and found her lying in the rubble. I think she had been cobalt blue once, but most of the paint was scratched off of her wings, and there was a deep carving in her belly, a half formed crescent shape, which prompted me to call her ‘Crestina’.

Seems terrible nicknaming runs in the family, hey?

I used to duck down so I could see nothing through the window but the sky, and push Crestina along the sill, to make her ‘fly’. I went all over the world in her, and even to Mars once or twice.

Now that I was older, I didn’t play anymore, but I still kept her close, always.

She gave me hope.

She showed me that no matter what happens, there’s always a future. That I might not be here anymore one day, but what I help to build will stand forever. The paint might fade and the framework dent and rust, but all inside would be safe. And that’s all that matters.

And now, running my fingers over her crude scar, I looked at the choice ahead of me and hoped she could give me courage.

Courage to think these awful, ungrateful thoughts.

To make this impossible choice.

If I left to get Thomas Rush, I’d be gone for weeks, maybe even months. But when I returned, John would still be here, still be up on that hilltop. He wasn’t going anywhere ever again, unless I helped him. Seventeen years he’d been there, waiting for someone who could see him.

For _me_.

He’d waited this long... surely he could wait a little longer?

People were _dying_ , being dragged off for sport in the Highwaymen’s fighting pits and derbys. Pitted against each other like animals, made to fight for their lives until they were so exhausted, they could barely stand, barely breathe. And now they were being enslaved at this ammunition factory Mickey had demanded they set up at the old jail.

Prosperity wouldn’t survive many more attacks.

New cracks in the walls every day. Our food being stolen, our armoury depleting fast. The seconds of our lives ticking away until Mickey and Lou finally put bullets in our brains.

I _had_ to find Rush.

But then I _realised_.

If I was killed on my way out east, if I never made it home, there would be no one left to help John and the other spirits… _forever._

Like I said before, whatever gave me this gift meant for me to use it. And it couldn’t just be a coincidence that the very first ghost I talked to used to be friends with my parents. Everything was pointing me in this direction, drawing me towards John and New Eden and my promise to the dead of Hope County. It sounds weird, putting the dead before the living, but deep in my gut, there was this gnawing that told me _this_ was my purpose.

I didn’t owe John anything.

I didn’t even really _like_ him.

And I owed my family _everything._

But I couldn’t leave him up there. I didn’t want him to be up on the peak anymore, with nothing but his bones and the birds that came to rest on them.

I thought this, even though he was arrogant, and smug, and talked to me like a child. Even though he scared me still. There was danger in his eyes, and he obviously wasn’t telling me the whole truth, but it just made me want to help him even more. I got the feeling that loneliness was something he was used to, that he had secrets and insecurities that he’d never told anyone, because he didn’t have anyone to tell them to. That it was all a front to hide some great loss or pain, because why else would anyone be such an asshole?

I wanted to know what was behind it all. To understand him. I wanted to share in his sadness and to show him that it was OK to just let it all go.

Because I knew what it was like to hide. I’d hidden all my life. In the bunker, from the fiery sky. In our old home, from the scavengers. In Prosperity, from our predators. In my own head, from my parents, who might never truly understand what I see.

I knew I couldn’t do it any longer.

It would probably destroy me if I did.

Secrets always do, eventually.

And so for the first time in my life, I was truly, _unforgivably_ selfish.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much everyone for sticking with this! I'm not overjoyed with this chapter, I feel like it's kind of waffly and I found the dialogue REALLY hard to write for some reason. But I need to get things going again with this, and not be such a perfectionist hahaha
> 
> As per usual, you can follow me on Tumblr at unclefungusthegoat (and my Twitter is in the opening note, if you want to follow me there too!)
> 
> Take care,  
> Chloe x


	6. John

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello everyone and welcome back! It's been WAAAAAAAY too long since I updated this, but here it is! Chapter 6! This has been a nightmare to write, partially because this was the first chapter I hadn't had anything written of before I started posting, so I was working completely from scratch. 
> 
> But I made it... sort of! And it's a LONG one- I'm just making up for all the waiting you've had to do hahahaha! The whole thing was really not how I imagined it going, especially the end, which wasn't on the cards AT ALL, but I think I'm sort of happy with the result? Bit of drama never did any harm!
> 
> Anyway, I hope you enjoy! Thanks so much for sticking with this! <3
> 
> I'd like to also just drop MAJOR WARNINGS for this chapter (I will adjust the tags too)- warnings for homophobia, stabbing, strangulation, exorcism, and PTSD type flashbacks about non-consensual touching (all towards the end, not sexual in nature but still triggering)

“How old are you John?”

“Guess.”

“I’d take a stab at… fifty, maybe?”

Carmina Rye was back on my mountain in full bludgeoning, tactless form. She’d blown in like a damp wind sock caught in a malfunctioning helicopter rotor and today was attempting to connect with me on an  _emotional_ level- otherwise known as endless more probing questions for me to dance around and half-answer. This was the third day she’d come to entertain me, or entertain  _herself,_ brimming with ideas on how to  _rescue_ me. She was creative, I give her that. Yesterday, she’d brought six candles and some powdered roots to burn as incense in a little homemade ritual she half remembered- and I quote- ‘  _this stoned guy_ ’ doing once.

She had no idea what it was for, but decided to try it anyway.

She’d set fire to the grass successfully, at least.

Yet despite all this camaraderie, she still kept a cautious distance, sat with her legs stretched out in front of her, and warily glancing at me, like I was festering with bubonic plague rather than just being dead.

And apparently she thought death did  _no_ favours for me.

“ _Fifty…?”_ I scoffed, aware that my voice suddenly raised an entire octave.

I turned to correct her and saw the cheeky smirk across her face.

“Relax,  _flyboy_ , I’m joking! What, your fun meter pegged or something?”

She proceeded to uproot a fistful of grass and wildflowers, and began to sift through them, sorting and threading, and for a moment, I was reminded of Rachel, with her milk-white Bliss flowers, lacing her tapestries at the convent with them, laughing as her priestesses teased the new Angels by dangling them in their faces. And of the new fun I’d found here, away from the metropolis of Atlanta. Of the days where I’d adorn a fresh sinner’s corpse with a crown of bones and flora. Relaxing into my art, the ecstasy of the Frankenstinian osmosis, barbarism, butchery, yet beauty, soothing the stress of a difficult atonement.

I was  _wild_ when I had fun.

And definitely  _not_ sat next to a seventeen year old.

“I’d like to see you try looking this good when  _you’re_ dead…” I ran my hand through my apparently eternally well-gelled hair. Thank  _God_ I was no longer victim to the ephemeral shifting of time, there isn’t exactly an abundance of Shu Uemura Hair Pomade beyond the veil. Being dead was embarrassing enough, but at least I could look  _presentable_ while doing it.

“You know, my Aunt Grace thinks I’m sneaking off to meet handsome boys in the forest.”

“Well, she’s not wrong-”

“Shut up, you’re like 40 years older than me-”

“Oh, so now, I’m nearly  _sixty?”_

She snorted at me, and, like an infection, I found a smile poisoning my face. I wanted to laugh with her, the scurrilous teasing so like that of her father. Nick and I couldn’t have been more different, but that didn’t stop me from, well,  _liking_ him. He was always unkempt and in dire need of a haircut. He drank cheap beer (the Whistling Beaver kind… beaver piss in bottles.  _Revolting.)_ He laughed at my disdain for the lack of a good local tailor, and my manicured nails, and my Georgia twang that still regretfully slipped out when I got a little too loose-lipped.

But I’d never really had  _friends_ before, at least none who weren’t held under threat of public scandal. Most only associated with me so they could drag me into a bathroom at the District Attorney's New Year soiree to find out just what my tongue could  _really_ do.

Nick didn’t ask anything of me. He just wanted to  _talk_. Drink. Fix planes and fly. He had oddly good taste in music, a charming anecdote for every occasion, and it turns out drinking beaver piss isn’t so bad when you’re drinking it with someone who isn’t expecting a blow job at the end of the night. He was everything I wasn’t. Stable. Normal.  _Free_.

And it was  _effortless._

So this? Sitting here with her?

It didn’t feel like 25 years had passed, and I almost wished I could spend the  _next_ 25 years sitting here with her, hearing her laugh at me, like he once had. I would  _never_ usually allow such ridicule, save from Jacob… and that was only because he was built like a brick shithouse. But in a way, she was family too. No, I reiterate, I was  _not_ her father. Instead, Nick had been my third brother. We had no shared blood, just the sweet sting of the icy air rushing through our veins.

But I let him mock me, as old friends do, as brothers do, to show they care.

And he made those the happiest days of my life.

“So, jokes aside, how old are you, really? Minus ghost years.”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Curiosity. We all kinda die young around here, just wanna know how far you made it.”

Over our previous two encounters, I had managed to discern glimpses of just who ‘we’ consisted of. Who had found their way to an early grave, as I had, and who hadn’t. 

Grace Armstrong was alive, unsurprising given her ferocity with a weapon. Pastor Jerome, though his faith was  _proved_ misguided, was still parading as a man of the cloth. He also had the honour of being the proud owner of an often misappropriated ATV. And what a  _waste_ young Mary May had made of herself. Succumbed to her sins, cast her life away in the name of pride, offering libation to an empty, cowering world, until she joined her brother and parents in death.

Stubborn, and sinful, to the last.

“I was born in 1986. I’m sure you can do the math, Baby Rye.”

I watched her count backwards in her head, and saw her face fall.

“Shit, that’s… young.”

“They say life is measured not by the amount of time you get, my dear, but how you use it. My time was mostly used  _for_ me… yet still, in a way, lasted far too long.”

“You must have had dreams though, stuff you wanted to do that you never got around to?”

“Don’t we all?”

She nodded, concurring, and I found myself wondering just what she had to regret in life. She clearly had few friends, her visionary gift a silent burden... she was riled by a lack of adventure, held captive by the peaks and slopes of the valley. Ah yes,  _that_ was it. What greater regret is there than unfulfilled purpose? Fear of dying young is only natural when you've barely lived. And that’s why she  _truly_ wished to help me.

“So I thought more about how to get you out of here last night...” Carmina plucked another fresh flower from out between the blades of grass, thoughtlessly  _desecrating_ my gravesite, I might add, and began twirling it between her fingers, “Since you can’t just walk out of here on your own, and the candle vigil didn’t work, and the whole ‘follow the leader’ thing with you holding onto my shoulders just ends up screwing with  _my_ head. And so I thought maybe I like… oh shit, you’re going to  _hate_ this…”

“Indulge me.”

“... I thought maybe I need to put you in a jar? Like if I’d caught a newt or something? Except… it’d be you.”

I gawped most unbecomingly at her.

“Please tell me that’s not a  _serious suggestion_.”

She shrugged, and tugged awkwardly at the end of her sleeves, pulling them down over her slightly scuffed knuckles. If she was trying to humour me again, there was little to show it. Slowly, she reached into the burgundy canvas bag she had sat beside her, and  _voila_ , produced the offensive glass  _monstrosity,_ still with homemade label pasted on the side.

It took all my strength not to laugh.

_Seeds for Garden._

Merciful God in Heaven, teach this child that irony is best  _avoided_.

“And how do you imagine I am going to get in there?”

“I figured maybe the laws of physics don’t apply to you anymore-”

“The laws of dignity do, sweetheart! I haven’t seen Joseph in nearly two decades, and I am telling you  _now_ , even if I  _could_ get in there, I am not having my glorious reunion with God’s chosen prophet from the inside of a  _jar.”_

“Come on, I bet loads of great things get put into jars in your Bible-”

I am not speechless often…  _ever_ , in fact. I grew out of it. Darwinism in its purest form. Meek children get beaten, stammering attorneys see no acquittals, and tongue-tied Heralds of Eden get  _excommunicated._

And now apparently stunned-into-silence ghosts get stuffed into jars, evidently the  _highest_ of honours in Carmina Rye’s world.

“ _That’s_ supposed to make me feel better?”

“It’s not  _that_ bad, I’ll even take the label off if you want...!”

“And what, get a new one and write ‘ghost’ on it, just so you remember what’s in it?”

Frustrated, she cast the jar aside, and proceeded to tear up another handful of my cemetery.

“OK, OK, I get it! No jars, bottles, boxes or anything that might otherwise tarnish your high standing with the great and powerful  _Father_. We’re  _arguing_ again. I thought we promised not to do that.”

An awkward silence permeated between us for a few moments, as we cooled our heads and returned to the equilibrium we were working so hard to nurture.

“I met him once.”

“Ah,  _ambiguity_. Definitely a desirable characteristic for things in jars-”

“ _Joseph Seed_ , dickwad. I met him. About 10 years ago. He was just wandering past our house one summer, a couple years after the resurfacing. He had this little basket of crap he’d picked up on the roadsides. Some feathers, flints, mustard seed, strawberries, a couple of apples, I think a dead rat or two… He saw I was hungry and gave me some.”

That definitely sounded like Joseph, forever trying to feed the five thousand. No doubt he saw a thin, desperate child and saw  _us_ , limping along a dusty Georgia road to school, delirious from hunger, lips cracked from failing to sneak by Father passed out on the kitchen floor, so that we could drink from the kitchen tap.

“He once was a peach picker... and he toiled in the sun…” I heard myself singing, as though the echoing voices of hundreds of the Project’s fallen were reminding me that our Father had always been so humble.

“Oh  _wow_ , you had  _songs_ about him… that’s kind of...” I assumed she was searching for an adjective that wouldn’t upset me.

“You can say it.”

“ _Unusually_   _enthusiastic_.”

“Nicely circumvented,” I commended her, with a chuckle, “Our hymns  _are_ a bit of an acquired taste. I bet you’re a Creedence fan, like your father?”

She beamed at me, her eyes lighting up, no doubt with the memory of summer evenings passing a variation of wrenches to her old man, “Oh  _hell yeah_. It Came Out Of The Sky, Bad Moon Rising, Who’ll Stop The Rain, and holy shit, ‘Fortunate Son’ is a  _classic_.”

“Yes, my brother liked that one too.” 

Too late, I realised what I’d said.

It seems that loose-lipped familiarity was as present here as it was with Nick. Any minute now, I’d be  _blessing her heart_ and  _thanking her kindly._

Indeed, bless her little heart, Carmina had seen the look on my face, and knew not to push it.

“Yeah, Creedence are great.” She lowered her voice, as though the decrepit stone walls of the Gate would tattle on us should we speak too loudly, “... but I’m also totally a Joan Jett girl.”

“Ah, a regular little rebel, I see!”

“Probably more than I should be.”

“Are septum piercings  _in vogue_ post apocalypse?”

“Not in Mom’s world. You think if I get one up at New Eden, it’ll distract her from the fact that I went there in the first place?” She grinned, letting me assume that she’d had this conversation multiple times already, with very little success.

“I hate to burst your bubble, Baby Rye, but I can’t see Joseph being frivolous with a needle. That was more  _my_ department.” I flexed my fingers to exhibit my handiwork, gothic calligraphy and cryptic iconography. By God, I wanted to show her my more finely detailed work. A tattoo is as much a part of you as freckles or fingerprints. That is why it was the perfect tool by which to display one’s sins, for they too are part of us. And as much as I adored this coat, custom designed and made to measure, it now hid so much of me, latched on to me for all eternity. It obscured the stages of my life that I had inked upon me to remind me of all that I had endured.

Things I had never wanted to hide again.

“Damn it. Well if he’s not up for a little rebellion, guess me and Joan will have to go it alone. Hey…” She shuffled forward a bit, satisfied that the jar discourse was now forgotten and I wasn’t about to lash out at her, “Since you know about music, you know, from before all this… could you teach me one of yours? One of your Joseph songs?”

_Oh, if only things had been this easy before._

“Why not?” I replied, readying myself to give my first sermon in seventeen years.

Across the next hour, aurora borealis began to shimmer across a sky bluer than a dead man’s lips, and Carmina diligently parroted a hymn her parents would probably throw a fit if they heard her singing. She laughed good-naturedly at a couple of the overly earnest lyrics, but I saw her get a little lost in the honest spirituality that comes with singing about hope. Even I, at my darkest point, had always found solace in song, if only for a short while. Sniffing a line off a toilet seat and slurring ‘ _This Little Light of Mine’_ can provide an oddly comforting experience.

“When the world falls into the flames… we will rise again…” She sang softly, staring out over the limited horizon, presumably towards the commune she called home. “That’s one hell of a prophecy… did you really believe it was coming?”

I raised my hands to gesture to the vibrant forestry that consumed the valley.

“I had every reason to.”

She pulled up another handful of wildflowers and began to thread them into a chain.

“I mean,  _before_ now.”

“Of course. Joseph isn’t a liar.”

“But why did you trust him so much?””

My fingers traced the scales of justice I had tattooed down my thumbs. I was certain that if mankind were to face the scales of Anubis, that Joseph’s honest soul would be in perfect balance to the feather.

“When Joseph found me, I didn’t care what or  _who_ I let inside me. Ink under my skin. Spit in my mouth. I had a 10 ounce brick of cocaine hidden in a drawer, right behind the Xanax prescription bottles I’d  _persuaded_ my doctor to give me. I smoked a pack a day, drank vodka every night until I passed out, because it was  _easier_ than falling asleep. Joseph stripped me of it all. Dismantled me and put me back together. Let the light of God fill me, when I had let in the darkness for so long.”

“You say he  _found_ you. Does that mean he had _lost_ you?”

I had already decided not to tell her my true relationship with Joseph. That would immediately put me into a position of authority in her eyes, a leader of the insurgency against her people. I had to play the everyman, the humble soldier, one of the hundreds.

“I  _was_ lost. To the world. To myself. He saw there was a better man in me. Talents I was wasting. Years I was throwing away by holding onto my past.”

“And you just let him change you? A complete stranger?”

He  _had_ been a stranger, when he’d walked into the law firm that day. I’d barely recognised him. I didn’t know a single fucking thing about him.

“So many who didn’t know him tried to discredit him, call him a false prophet, have him arrested,  _sectioned_ even. They saw the power of his words and they feared what the strength of his wisdom ignited within those of us who chose to follow him. It is not possible to hold that much heavenly inspiration without having been touched by the hand of God. I saw that. And I knew I had to surrender to it. I  _wanted_ to.”

I remembered crumpling to my office floor, all those years ago, as I wept with disbelief that my brother had found me. And I remembered gazing into his soft eyes as he cradled me, and seeing not my brother, but someone else entirely. As if an angel had broken through the clouds and inhabited his fragile mortal form, celestial grace illuminating the nooks of his skull, and peeking through the pale blue of his pupils.

“Touched by the hand of God?”

“Yes.”

“And you believed that?”

“As I said, my dear, I had every reason to. I saw God in my new Father’s face, heard Him in his words.”

“And you believed in it so much that you were willing to  _die_ for it?”

“You’d die for your family, wouldn’t you? If they asked you to?”

I watched her frown and for a moment, wondered if I had overestimated her. Misjudged her relationship with Nick and Kim… no, surely not? I’d witnessed her impassioned defence of them and their good names when I’d insinuated they were to blame for the havoc wrought across the county.

And then she opened her mouth.

“Families should never ask that of you. If they’re really your family, they’d go to the ends of the earth before they’d let you get hurt. Yeah, I’d take a bullet for them, if it came to it. But they’d  _never_ make me feel like I didn’t have a choice. They wouldn’t put that on me. And he shouldn’t have put that on you. Any of you.”

She finished her flower chain and broke it apart again, ripping it up, tearing the petals from each individually, and using blunted fingernails to peel back the stems. The remnants scattered around her, and settled on the knees of her jeans.

_He loves me._

_He loves me not._

_“Prove to me that you love me as much as I love you.”_

Obviously I didn’t agree with Baby Rye’s interpretation of affairs of the heart. Love is sacrifice. Love is pain. Love is  _conditional_. I’d learned that through years of  _living_ it. My parents didn’t love me, not at first, but they loved what they  _made_ me.

Joseph  _did_ love me.  _I_ was the problem there. I never understood how to love him back. I tried to  _buy_ his love, throwing my money at his dream so that he could see my worth. I wanted to do more, give him more, show him how much I deserved to be by his side. Those were  _my_ conditions. But, as I reminisced across our lives, watching the clouds circle the sky for seventeen years, I realised he had had a different set of conditions for his love.

And I clearly hadn’t loved him enough to work out what they were.

It would take more than the naive preaching of a clueless teenager to convince me that love was anything other than  _selfish_.

“No one has the right to force you to die for them. Not even if they say they’re ‘sent by God’ or whatever.” She continued.

Something struck deep within me, an uncomfortable, unfamiliar feeling, but I held her gaze.

“Who said I was forced?”

“No one,” A sad smile crossed her face,  _pitying_ me, “But there’s a look you get when you talk about him, John. It tells me everything I need to know. But…!”

She suddenly blustered towards me, rising to her feet. She offered me her hand before deciding otherwise, and quickly withdrew it. I stood unaided, my eyebrows arched in amusement.

“... if you still want to go and see him, we need to get you off of this mountain.  _Without_ the jar. There has to be a reason you can’t leave, something keeping you here…”

I shrugged at her.

“Of course there is, this is where I  _died._ ”

Carmina’s eyes widened, and I was vaguely reminded of the local lunatic Larry Parker, and his Mars machine. I hoped she wasn’t thinking of building such a contraption, she could barely work a  _candle_.

“Holy shit, of _course-_ ”

She turned away from me, striding up the gradual incline towards the Gate. Her boots thundered across the dry ground, dust rising into the air, and with each heavy footfall, I felt a twisting dread wringing out my insides.

She was moving directly towards the miserable heap of bones that were sprawled out at the top of the hill…  _my_ bones.

“What are you doing?”

Why did I ask? I already knew.

“It’s the answer John! It has to be!”

_Shit._

“You can’t know that, Baby Rye-”

She wasn’t looking at me. She couldn’t see the look on my face, jaw set in knowing anticipation,  _waiting_ for it. And I couldn’t see hers, but even the back of her skull, bundled under that red beanie hat, told me  _exactly_ what she intended to do.

“It’s not like you need them anymore!”

“But…” I hissed, “... but they’re  _mine_!”

I admit I disappointed myself. Three years of Harvard for  _‘they’re mine’_.

“John, you’re scared, I get it. But it’s just a body, and they’re just bones. I see bodies every day. They don’t belong to you anymore, they belong to the earth. And they’re keeping you here, they’re trapping you on this hill because they’re  _part_ of this hill! We have to break the connection, we have to break  _them_ -”

“ _Carmina-_ ”

A pleading look on her face.

“Just trust me.”

“ _WAIT-”_

There was an excruciating crunch, as leather swathed foot snapped the lines of my mottled, brittle ribs, and though I no longer had a sensual connection to them, I felt myself twinge and wince with the notion. The edges of my vision blurred, peripherals fading into darkness, like I was dying all over again, as I was sucked into watching her destroy me.

“You sacrilegious, _disrespectful_ little-”

“HEY, do you want to see Joseph or not?”

Another rib splintered, this one crowned with a dull maroon halo, where it had punctured my lung.

“ _Stop_...” My voice drowned in my throat.

She couldn’t hear me.

The blood would be rushing in her ears, the thrill of destruction, whether she was conscious of it or not, was  _consuming_.

If only she knew. Knew that I had lain so when I was alive and that I could recount exactly how this felt in painstaking detail. How it felt to be violated, my bodily autonomy  _ripped_ away from me with every bruise, every lash, every fucking reason why someone else had to  _touch_ me. Hands on my thighs, around my neck. For my salvation, guidance by a holy hand, for my ‘own damn good’.

“Do you feel any different?” She panted, calling out to me, never taking her eyes from her conquest, “Can you feel the connection breaking?”

_“Almighty God, we call upon your might and mercy to free this child from Satan’s corrupting grip… we call upon your strength to bring this soul back into the light…”_

_Holy Water up my nose. Burning in my throat. Flavoured with stone._

_“Mother… Mother, don’t hurt me…please don’t hurt me...”_

The bones that were still fused together by single sinews and skin like brown curling paper were separated by the force of her next strike. She stood on my fingers, bare like whittled white ash, and I heard six year old John Duncan scream.

Maybe  _I_ was screaming…

Why couldn't we still be sat singing together?

_“Almighty God, through his suffering, this child shows willing to be filled with virtue… hear how he cries, calls for your glory… in Jesus’s name, we beg you...”_

_A crucifix in my face, thorned diadem taking sacrifice, pressing into my skin._

_Cutting me open._

Of course she didn’t understand, she had never even laid eyes on the Word of Joseph, let alone read the gospel that paraded my shame and torment before the world. Yet this felt  _purposeful._ Cruel. Not by her, but by the God who puppeted those around me. Those who used their hands to slowly rip my body apart, no matter how hard I begged them not to.

Oh, if only I could  _breathe._ Fight back this anger, this resentment I could feel filling me as I watched her shatter what little of me I had left. What little of me still belonged to the world.

I didn’t  _want_ to resent her.

I could still hear her laughing. Kind. Honest. Safe.

I could still hear her singing of her neighbours, ‘ _thin and frail_ ’, and I saw the burden of family tearing through her blue eyes, as it had mine once. 

Maybe, somehow, we were the  _same_.

But with every slam of her boot into the earth, I felt… I  _felt..._

_“We give his body to you, Lord. Return it to us pure, and purged of demonic intent. His innocence festers under Beelzebub’s gaze, the Princes of Hell are swarming to consume him… in your name, oh God, save him!”_

_Why wouldn’t they stop touching me?_

Did you know,  _vanity_ comes from  _defilement_?

Beauty from destruction.

 **VANAGLORIA**.

Or at least, we  _pretend_ it does.

_What’s broken is broken._

And I deserved  _better_.

**SUPERBIA.**

“Jo- Jo-  _John-_ ” Carmina was rasping, her voice so close, I could almost feel her breath on my face, and suddenly, I saw that I had followed her and my palm had closed around her neck. She was small and thin, my hand  _easily_ grasped the width of it, and dragged her from the ground. Feet kicking the air, powdered bone and dirt being thrown from where it had lodged in the grooves of her boots. Eyes darting,  _bulging._ I watched the tendons in my hand pulse.

**IRA.**

Tensed to crush her windpipe, to pull on the dark necklace looped around her throat and  _throttle_ her with it until the skin parted and sagged open. Her hands were clawing at me, nails that had pulled apart the delicate flowers now trying to shred the skin I had armoured through years of suffering. 

And there it was again. That  _warmth_ of life.

**INVIDIA.**

“ _Don’t fucking touch me_...” I spat.

They were the last words I’d said to my mother, on the night she struck me for the final time. The night I swore no one would  _ever_ touch me again, unless I  _wanted_ them to.  _Deviant. Disgrace._ The night she’d seen who I truly was. The night she’d searched my phone, and found a video taken at a frat party, final year at college. _Sodomite. Sick._ On my knees, gagging on my classmate, lust dripping from the corners of my mouth. 

 **LUXURIA**.

_“Your body is God’s, and you have defiled it!”_

The night I put a kitchen knife through her jugular. And again, through her heart, slamming it down into her over and over again, because once just wasn’t enough. Turning on my father, who cowered in a corner. Finishing the good scotch he’d left half finished, blood still on my hands, before taking the bottle from the side and tipping it over my face.

**GULA.**

“ _DON’T TOUCH ME_ -” I heard my voice crack, as I screamed at her, staring down at my smashed remains. All I had left.

All that was  _mine._

**AVARITIA.**

“I’m s- sorry, I’m so- o- ju- get- ju- ge- o- off me _\- pl-ple-ase-_ ” Her eyes were starting to roll back in their sockets, tears streaming down her freckled cheeks. I looked at the whites that were starting to blossom with crimson, as the pressure built inside her head, blood vessels threatening to burst. And I looked at  _her._ I saw her writhing under an unwanted grip, suffocating in  _agony,_ slowly surrendering to the pain.  _Just as I had done._

**TRISTITIA.**

Oh, yes,  _yes,_   _YES_. 

Things  _never_ change.

Here she was, Nick’s daughter,  _taking_ from me, defacing me, once a friend, perhaps a friend no more, just like all those years ago. I, with the eyes of one father, and a soul beaten into the image of another, teaching a heathen child what happens when you don’t  _listen_.

Like father, like daughter. Like father, like son.

We were the same _._

We  _are_ the same.

And we might  _always_ be the same, never changing.

**ACEDIA.**

I'd already embraced it, over and over again. I could do it again, right here, right now. Be who they said I was, who they made me. 

Let my curse  _consume_  me.

After all, it was written there, for all time, on the hand I had around her throat.

“... _John…”_ Carmina Rye choked, her struggle weakening.

Always the same.

Always the same.

_Always the same._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well...
> 
> ... you can find out what happens, next time, in Chapter 7 of Icarus and Styx! I have no idea when it'll be up, I know what happens in it, but I haven't even started it yet hahahaha! However, I have a lot of train travel coming up, and I write a lot on trains sooooo
> 
> As usual, if you want to follow another FC5 blog, ask me stuff about this fic and see the occasional rambling update, you can find me on Tumblr at unclefungusthegoat!
> 
> Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoyed it!
> 
> Take care,  
> Chloe x


	7. Carmina

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello all! Welcome back to an exceptionally long update! This chapter just sort of ran away from me, and it's nearly a whole 1300 words longer than I had intended it to be! I hope it's not too much to read in one go, or that it's not a drag to get through! I do worry about these things... my beta reader Lucy (Tybss) said it was OK, but my paranoia lives on hahahaha
> 
> Anyway, here we are! I hope you enjoy it!
> 
> There is also a BEAUTIFUL piece of art at the bottom of Carmina and John that I commissioned on Tumblr from an artist called Ziorre! They've done a spectacular job, and I really wanted to share it here!

“... John?”

One broken rib was all it took to make me realise that John  _really_ wasn’t OK with this whole bone smashing situation. The moment my boot went through it, I saw his eyes widen, pupils like supernovas, full of light one second, consumed by this empty darkness the next, tears like stardust spitting across the universe. It was like he wasn’t even there anymore. Not really. And he cried out… but it wasn’t the voice of a grown man. It was more like a hurt kid, who’d found his dog under the wheels of a car.

I backed away, careful that I didn’t step on any more, but he kept staring where my foot had landed. His eyes didn’t even follow me when I went to him, and I could tell he was seeing something I couldn’t. 

“Oh shit, I’m so sorry John, I’m so sorry...”

Bodies aren’t precious in my world. We choose to remember a person’s spirit, their life, soul and stories, mostly because it’s rare we actually get a body to bury. And like I said, they belong to the earth. Mankind destroyed the world we’d built, and while we hid in the dirt, it was nature’s time to reclaim what we had taken from it. Giving our bodies back to the ground was just part of it. We all die. We all rot. We get fossilised, entombed in amber, eaten and shit out by worms. It’s just the way things are.

I swear, I thought John believed the same. He’d sat, uncaring, by his body for years, watching the wildlife devour it. What would be the point of being protective over it  _now_? Hell, the first time I saw him, his foot was resting on his skull like he was flooring the gas pedal.

Until I saw  _this_.

This… this was something else.

He was taller than me, but I reached up to take his face in my hands, trying to draw him back into whatever weird ass reality we were in where I was comforting a  _ghost having a panic attack_. First step- working out what the problem was. As a slightly shimmering pattern of refracted light or whatever he was now, the cracked bones didn’t seem to have had any physical effect. He wasn’t fading away, and his body hadn’t reacted to the break. So it wasn’t like I’d caused him pain… was it? Had I hurt him?

I couldn't get a hold of his face. It was like he could touch  _me_ , but I couldn't touch  _him_.

“Hey, it’s OK, I’ve stopped. It’s over. I’m sorry if I hurt you…”

“ _Don't fucking touch me-”_ he hissed.

Immediately, I pull my hands away, only he’s now looking above my head, as though I was a puppet, and he couldn’t quite believe I was on strings.

His chest was rising and falling as he panted with this visceral anger, but I couldn’t actually hear any breath coming from him. His hands were balled into fists, trembling with the struggle, crushing nothing. The moonlight was filtering through the sallow grey of his cheeks, yet wasn’t reflected in the bronze buckles and buttons on his jacket. And it was seeing him like this that really made me realise how half-complete he was now, an echo with no real connection to this world... except what I had almost just destroyed.

 _Fucking hell_ , Carmina, what the fuck did you  _do?_

“DON’T TOUCH ME,” he screamed again.

“I won’t, I promise. Not if you don’t want me to. You just need to calm down and then we can work this out together, like we said, OK? We’re not gonna get anywhere if you’re all beaded up like this-”

Something changed in him.

“ _Always the same.”_

I felt like the Earth's gravity had spat Hell out from under us, and it had settled over his face.

“ _No_...  _NO-!_ "”

And the hellfire brewed in his eyes, changing him again, turning his gaze to something…  _someone_ entirely different, but still unseen.

“You  _dare_ lay a hand on me again,  _bitch,_ I will make a whetstone from your skull, draw a knife over your scalp till I’m through to the brain, and I’ll  _cut_ the  _festering piety_ out of  _you_ -”

What the hell did that mean?

“-take the fingers from your hand, force them down your throat and watch you  _choke,_ hear you  _gag_ on the sin that has infected them through  _every_ hurt you brought against me _-”_

“John, stop it... stop it  _right now-_ ” I’d never heard him talk like this, words dripping with venom and…  _glee_... and it  _scared_ me.

Who was he talking to? He was still oblivious to my ridiculous flailing hands passing through his forearms as I tried to let him know that I was there beside him.

 _“-open_ you from sternum to gut and pull  _everything_ from you until you’re  _begging_ for me to  _kill you,_ maybe I’ll string you up and nail you to the  _wall,_ stigmata like the God you  _claim_ to  _serve-”_

He froze again, and seemed to shrink within himself.

“… if we are made the very  _image_ of  _God_ , then why did you hurt me? Isn't  _that_ a sin? Aren't you hurting God?” He whispered, childlike in his face, lip quivering, timid like I had never seen him before. “Why do you hate me,  _Mother_?”

Oh  _fuck._

Oh fuck, if only I’d known.

How could I?

There was nothing I could do. I felt sick. In that moment, I was  _useless_. I wanted to hold him, to tell him that she couldn't hurt him anymore, but we were separated by more than I could conquer alone.

“Children suffer for their  _parents_ ’ sins. They were broken… so we break  _you._ Cast the  _devil_ from you  _._ ” His voice mocked in a cruel imitation.

His eyes snapped to meet mine.

“There's  _nothing_ of God in me. When they took the devil from me, they left nothing behind, but an empty space for demons to fill. They  _broke_ me, broke my body. And they did without hearing me  _once._ ” And he grasped my cardigan sleeve, twisting the fabric between his fingers, returning to some of his senses “- I don't want to  _hurt_ you, Carmina. You're not  _her._ ”

My heart leapt into my throat.

“You're not gonna hurt me. I know you won’t.” What else could I say? From the moment I'd met him, my stomach had turned with this overwhelming urge to run away, my instincts screaming at me that nothing good would come from him. That he'd have his hands around my throat, or impaled through my ribcage.

He stopped.

Slow.

He could see the fear back on my face.

And he bared those perfect teeth into that dead half smile.

“Are you  _sure,_ Baby Rye?”

I stared him down, careful to not let my voice shake.

“Of course I am.”

“You think I wouldn't?” The threat was there, but something in me didn't believe it.

“You're not a monster John. There's no demons inside of you, there's no such thing. The only thing in you is  _you_. And you're  _good._ A little… _troubled,_ yeah, but that doesn't make you evil.”

“Doesn't it?”

“No. Not unless you let it.”

“They knew this would come to pass. I taste brimstone on my tongue, even the holy water  _reeked_ of it-”

“Stop it-”

“-I wander this  _fucking_ earth,  _still_ , forsaken, when I should be-”

I moved close, right into his face, so he could see nothing of the world around him but me. I couldn’t lose him to this anger again. 

“Stop it! We’re not our parents. I’m not mine, I think you see that, and you are  _definitely_ not yours. And don’t you fucking dare think that you’re stuck here because you’re not worthy of your Heaven or your Eden or whatever. You just… you just got a little  _lost_.”

I showed him my open hands, palms empty aside from the grooves, a love line and a life line, dusted slightly with grime from a day's labour. They told a story,  _my_ story, rough with the actions I took to become the woman I am today. The choices I made, and the consequences of those decisions. And right now, they bore something so unfamiliar to me.

Inaction.

One that I would gladly take.

“Like I said that first day… I'm not gonna fight you. Not like my parents did. I didn't want to hurt you, but I've brought this darkness back to you. I’m sorry. I don't fully understand what’s hiding in there, I probably never will. But I see it. And if my seeing it, my mistake in reminding you of something you wanted to forget, makes you want to hurt me… then do it. Do it.”

He just watched me. He didn't even flinch, save for a vein in his forehead that pulsed with blood that couldn't have even been flowing.

“But I know you won’t, John. I know you are better than that. And I  _trust_ you.”

And, for the first time, I  _meant_ it.

“I trust you.”

For a moment, nothing.

A bloodlust in his glare.

Then he launched forward, and for a moment, I thought he had given in to it all. I didn’t look away. If this was it, I’d watch it coming, face death square on.

But he was turning... turning away to sink to the ground, settling into the grass once again. His silent breathing eased, and his fists uncurled. I felt my own body sag with relief, and knew that I'd be going home to watch another moon rise over the valley.

I moved to sit across from him, as we had been only moments before.

“See? You’re not evil. You’re not like her. And I'm not either. You don't want me to go near your bones, I won’t. Not until you're ready, even if you're never ready. I'm listening OK? And I  _hear_ you. I hear you.”

His eyes were wide.

How could anyone look so vulnerable and terrifying at the same time?

“You do?”

“Yes John.  _Yes_.”

He closed his eyes, in contentment, bliss. The world around us, dark yet aglow with the aurora, suddenly seemed serene, like the pond I used to throw stones into to try and spook the fish to the surface.

“ _There_ it is… that's all I wanted. All I ever wanted...” He whispered and fell quiet.

I sat with him for what felt like hours, only it must have been just minutes,  _seconds_ maybe.

“You’re… you’re not hurt?” He asked, breaking the silence, searching my neck for bruises or contusions, like he couldn't believe it. The only thing bruised was my conscience. I'd talked myself out of it in the end, but it had been my fault. I'd still, in my ignorance, brought his nightmares rushing back.

“Of course not.”

“OK.”

Neither of us knew what to say. We didn’t really know what the other had actually experienced, had thought they’d seen, and we  _definitely_ weren’t about to share. It was better left unsaid. And now that the storm had calmed, the problem still remained. He was stuck here, now anxiously tugging at the cord looped around his neck, like he had been when I'd first seen him. And I was out of ideas, tired and clueless on where to start over.

“What is that?” I gestured at the cord, desperate to change the subject to something mundane. A keepsake of a good memory? A minimalist statement for an oddly overdressed religious nut?

“It's the key to this bunker,” He answered, barely more than a murmur. “Our enemies would try to steal it, so I kept it on me for safekeeping.”

“Oh… wow, Joseph must really have trusted you-" I started, before the proverbial light bulb didn't just illuminate, but full on  _shattered_ from the sheer force of a bright idea.

“ _Safekeeping..._?”

No answer.

“John… maybe we can just take one with us? A bone! Take the  _connection_ with us!”

“ _What_?” He sounded exhausted.

“I can put it on this!” I pulled the leather cord out from where it was tucked under my shirt. I’d adopted it as a choker a couple of years ago. Part of my grungy garage girl aesthetic. The kind of style that says ‘I can disassemble and reassemble an engine in half a morning, and I'll beat your ass if you think you know any better’.

“... I fail to see how that would work.”

“They keep you here, so we take  _here_ with us. We just need to find a piece that has a strong enough link to you...”

In my excitement, I went to move back over to the bones, but hesitated.

“Can I…?”

He took a moment to weigh up everything that I had just said, all that had passed. His face was blank as he tried to shake off the echoes of his Mother’s torment, still haunting him even after it was over. And then, not even looking at me, he gave a curt nod.

"I'll be careful. I promise."

I went and knelt beside his remains, searching for any fragments that could be threaded onto the necklace.

Nothing struck me as an easy option, but hey, what is life if everything is easy? There had to be something, somewhere, that I could use. Something small, easily concealable. Nothing too heavy that would weigh me down. Nothing too thin that could snap.

A stupid idea crossed my mind, and I took the chance to try and liven things up again.

“Hey, maybe I could also get that septum piercing and stick one of your smaller bones through? Make some earrings to match? I'd look like a witch… or a cannibal, I guess. Either would be cool.”

“Please  _don’t._ ”

OK, so humour wasn’t going to work here. But I gave him a cheeky smile anyway.

“Fine, suit yourself.”

I searched a little longer, but it was official. There were no bones in the human body that could easily thread onto a cord, none that were even worn down in that way, except for the two staring eye sockets. And I couldn’t exactly thread a  _whole skull_ on there.

“Damn, there's no pre-holed one. I'm gonna have to take one with me back to Prosperity and get my craft on. Get out my drill.”

I turned my head to look over my shoulder at him. He was settling now, his jaw looser, his eyes not quite so glazed over. I wished I had my Mom’s controlled hand at dealing with nightmares. I mean, I’m not  _awful_ , I’d learned how to dry tears and chase monsters away with the younger kids. But I’d never lived in a place where nightmares didn’t come true, like she had. In the world before, you could just cast them away. Here, every nightmare was just an omen of something to come. You can't tell a kid that there's no monsters coming, when you  _know_ they are. Because they always  _have_.

“Is that OK with you?”

He rubbed at his mud-speckled temples.

“Can’t you just carry it as it is?”

“Seriously? You’re going to deny me the chance to even  _challenge_ your level of drama? Deny the world the cannibal queen I’m destined to become?” 

I smirked and held up a small finger bone under my nose, displaying how badass I'd look with it stuck through. I wiggled it around, like I would if I was playing with the kids back home, and suddenly my impressively sacrilegious accessory became reminiscent of a bushy moustache in some old slapstick movie.

He narrowed his eyes and his smile returned, surprisingly somewhat unreluctantly.

Ah,  _there_ it was.

“You are aware that you look  _ridiculous_?”

I crossed my arms in mock annoyance.

“I'd look more ridiculous just carrying a bone around all the time for no apparent reason. What would I tell everyone? And we have to go back to Prosperity anyway. We'll… I mean,  _I'll_ need supplies if we're hiking over to New Eden. It’s risky stopping to fish or forage and I'm not exactly armed. I've only got 3 bullets in my .38 and I left my knife in my room. Plus, I need to put the jar back.”

John rolled his eyes.

“And Jacob used to think  _I_ took forever to get ready.”

I guessed then that Jacob was this brother John had been shy about earlier. He’d mentioned him a couple of times before, and I thought he'd be a friend, or a boyfriend maybe. But who would you want to see more than your  _brother_? Something I’d always kinda secretly wished for. And I found I was excited to meet him. I wondered how much they looked alike, if he was just as much of a smartass, if they'd taken to the skies together… I wanted to see John with this family he was so desperate to get back to. Wanted to see how much he’d change just by being with them.

“Well Jacob's waited this long, I think just one more day won't kill him.”

John smiled wryly.

“Somehow, I don't think he's been waiting for me, my dear.”

Yielding, he sighed and stood.

“I suppose we can’t be having you  _caught_ with such things as human remains. Certainly not those of  _older men_. Whatever would your Aunt Grace think? The  _scandal._ ”

He knelt beside me to aid in my selection. I watched him take a long look at each individual limb, finally at ease again, moving his fingertips over as if cataloguing his own anatomy. Not gonna lie, it was unsettling, seeing a ghostly hand pass over the bones that once made up a living copy. I wondered if I’d be doing the same one day, and if I’d sit and hold my own hand because there’d be no one there to comfort me.

“Oh, and a word of warning, Carmina Rye.” He purred as he worked.

“...Yeah?”

Another threat? God, I hoped not. His comment about slitting open my sternum still made the hairs on my arms stand on end.

“Don’t mention being the  _cannibal queen_ in front of Jacob.”

“Why, is he vegetarian?” I breathed, in relief.

His attention moved to the back of his skull, where the top had been cracked away by curious bird beaks and hailstones the size of marbles. Through his eye sockets, once so blue, and between the wildflowers poking through, I could see there were a few fragments scattered, perfectly sized for a necklace. He took a moment longer to make his choice, before gesturing to an almost diamond shaped shard.

“Nothing of the sort, my dear. I just thought I’d save you the monologue.”

I gathered up the bone and slipped it into my retrieved bag, alongside the discarded jar. We took a moment to collect our thoughts, to take a final look at the hilltop that had been his home for so long, before we stood side by side, together, at the brow of the path leading away. Black Horse Peak, riderless forever. Now home to only the dead, and not the half-living. The loneliest place in the county, somehow even lonelier.

“Are you sure about this?” After all that, I had to double check, had to know that this was what he really wanted. We had a long road ahead.

“Yes.”

“You ready to go see Jacob?”

“Let’s go.” He replied, more content than I had ever heard of him before.

And we started down the path towards home.

I can’t believe it  _actually worked._

We mostly cut through forestry on our way back, off road, out of sight, down past Roughneck’s Crag, through Bradbury Woods, heading towards Gambler’s Run. And when we eventually reached the main road, leading towards Prosperity, we kept tucked into the shadows. The idea of watching Highwaymen driving straight through John was hilarious (at least, I thought so) but we both agreed that it was best we didn’t find out if they actually could. And I  _definitely_ couldn’t afford to be roadkill tonight.

To everyone we passed, I walked alone. The leaves didn’t move underfoot, didn’t twist and fold and crunch under John’s weight. The dirt didn’t spill over itself to form new craters and valleys in the road. The stranger in a trapper’s hat with a bow slung over his shoulder nodded once and only once. A family in an old Kimberlite, an ugly gold one with the bumper hanging off, screeching and sparking along the ground, offered me a lift.

Even in these simpler times, you don’t get in cars with unfamiliar faces at the wheel. 

We turned onto the path that led down towards Prosperity, and I noticed John’s pace start to halter, his footsteps becoming hesitant. I figured he was nervous to see everyone again, to be reminded of how time had passed, to see that the world had moved on without him.

“Hey, flyboy, if you’re panicking about what you’re gonna say, remember no one can see you anyway, so all awkward reunions are basically avoided.” I grinned at him, trying to nudge his elbow slightly, with no success.

“As much as I appreciate your diplomacy, Carmina, what I believe I’m experiencing is more an acute case of deja vu.”

“Really? I thought you said Prosperity was near the Henbane when you were alive?”

“Indeed it was, and home to a junkie who could barely string a sentence together. Although with no significant persuasion, he did get his hands on 10oz of high quality grass for me.” He cast his gaze down to me, “Tell Joseph that and I’ll haunt you forever.”

“Duly noted.”

“Anyway, seeing as I have no idea what  _that_ is, I’m going to attribute my deja vu to having probably driven this road… probably got  _ticketed_ by Whitehorse’s overzealous  _goons-_ ” He pointed up at the patchwork of wood panelling, creeping plants and blue tarpaulin, looming on the hilltop under the waning moon, “Do you know what was here  _before_ the circus pulled into town?”

“I think it was a farm of some sort?”

“In this valley, you have no idea how unhelpful that description that is.”

Two minutes later, and we were at the gate, watching it crawl open. John snorted as we listened to the mechanism creak and grind and groan, and watched the white sun on its honey coloured sky split down the middle, like it was torn in half by a yawning monster.

“Shut up-” I murmured at him, before a face that always makes me smile appeared around the corner.

“Carmingloria! Been out fightin’ hordes of undead?”

I couldn’t help myself.

“Just the one.”

“Aw shit man, musta been a showdown for the ages.”

Uncle Sharky jogged over to me and pulled me into a bear hug. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see John’s face twisted into a sneer, and if he’d had any life left in him, I felt like I would be watching it leave his body.

“ _Charlemagne Boshaw is still alive_? Will my torment  _never_ end?”

I buried my snort into Uncle Sharky’s sooty shoulder, and wondered for a moment how little Blade Drubman ever managed to fall asleep here with the stink of recent arson attack lingering.

And then I wondered, not for the first time, how little Blade Drubman ever slept  _at all._

“Oh man, Car, I'm sorry, musta had a lil’ schmutz on my shirt there to make y’sneeze. Thought Rye nostrils were made of stronger stuff, with all the fumes and shit you guys respiriate, y’know, don't ever try coke, Car, you'd probably burst a kidney or sneeze your brains out like spaghetti-Os or somethin’. Can girls get hernias?”

The groan that came out of John made me laugh all over again.

“I’m pretty sure they can, Uncle Sharky-”

“Uncle  _Sharksideous,_ Carmingloria  _-_ ”

“-Uncle Sharksideous, but I’m not sure sneezing would ever be that bad. And you forgot, I bunk with Selene, I’ve smelt  _everything._ ” I pulled away from him, my clothes now covered in a light dusting of ash, “Speaking of bunking, I’m really tired. so I’m gonna head up now. Zombie slayers need beauty sleep. Wanna look my best when I eventually get turned.”

“Nah, no way you'd turn. You ain’t called Carmin _gloria_ for nothin’, Car.”

“And I thought you'd retired being Sharksideous for like three years now?” I raised an eyebrow at him.

“Imperator Sharksideous never rests, Car, he  _rises_ , and you can't rise ‘less you been down a bit first, y’know?”

The shrill cries of a baby in need of a bottle or clean diaper cried out from somewhere inside, and Uncle Sharky jumped a little, before giving me a salute.

“Mommas never rest either, man- gotta go!”

And he turned and started moving towards the not so tuneful baby-song… and in the process, strode  _straight though_ John, who was lingering in the gate, judgmentally eyeing up our eternally noisy compound.

While my wannabe-warlord uncle didn't even flinch, John suddenly looked like he wanted to vomit. Every muscle froze in horror, as parts of him flickered away momentarily as he almost…  _fused…_ with the live body moving through him. He was whole again within seconds. But the experience was clearly still… weird. Uncomfortable. And apparently,  _nauseating_.

“Ugh,  _fuck._ ”

Eyes bulging, he checked himself over to see if all his limbs were still present in this dimension. Or maybe he was checking to see if Uncle Sharky had left anything behind…?

“That was exponentially more intimate than I had  _ever_ desired to be with that  _cretin_. I can't even begin to  _fathom_ why someone allowed him to  _procreate_.”

After explaining who Blade’s real dad was, and seeing an even more affronted expression cross John's face, I burst into giggles that I didn't even try to hide as we moved across the grass. I waved at Roger, who was sat beside the fire next to a pretty blonde who'd arrived in the county from the east, North Dakota or something. I could hear him offering to show her the fallout zone from the sky, and even in the orange firelight, could see her blushing at his advances.

I kind of wished I could make friends with the nomads who pass through… but I couldn't take that risk. I trust, but not easily. One misplaced friendship, and I could get us all killed. I can't have that on me.

Yeah, I know what you're thinking. But John wasn't really a stranger at all. An old family friend. And besides, what could a dead guy do to destroy my world?

I passed through the threshold, hearing him behind me still grumbling about Uncle Sharky and gestured to the stairs.

“This way. I'd show you where the bathroom is, but I'm not sure you'll need it, unless you wanna throw ectoplasm up or- are you OK?”

For someone who rarely shut up, he’d gone, if you ignore my terrible choice of words,  _deathly_ quiet.

“John...?”

And then he was walking away from me, gaping at the high ceiling-ed hub; the cushions in the corners, the books stacked carelessly on the shelves, the string lights like stars above our heads. He ran his fingers along the mantle on the fireplace, and paused to stare into the fire, where the embers were dying for the day. I didn’t get it. There was nothing about our home to warrant that much amazement.

Unless...

“Like I said, an old farmhouse or something… right?”

He dangled his fingers into the flames, as if desperate to feel something again.

“The wicked are overthrown and are no more... but the house of the righteous will stand. The house of the wicked will be destroyed, but the tent of the upright will flourish.”

More God stuff. Since he’d freaked me out with all that talk of nakedness the first time we met, I’d taken a couple of long looks at the Bible, deep into the midnight hours. There was something hypnotic about it, so pretty and sincere, written by saints and dictated by angels. Words from beyond the sky. Sometimes soothing, always terrifying, that we all live in the shadow of a Father we won't meet until we've breathed our last. A Father who could turn us away if we disappointed him.

I loved it.

I didn't  _believe_ it. I don't think I have to, though, to see its worth. To see how you could cling to it when everything seemed dark and hopeless.

He straightened his back and that confident, arrogant fuckface returned.

“When I said ‘circus’ on the way up here, I didn't think you'd actually continue it as a theme  _inside,”_ He sniffed, waving his hand at the lights and the splashes of colour. “It truly does seem that Hell is empty, and all the  _clowns_ are here.”

“Speak for yourself...” I frowned, annoyed at his attitude. Yeah, it wasn't much, but had he  _looked_ at the world? Interior design wasn't exactly a top priority.

“Your father never did have any sense of style. And now it seems he’s swapped canary yellow for chintzy brocade and indoor forestry? Isn’t there enough of that  _outside?_ ”

I planted myself firmly in front of him, glancing over my shoulder to check that Roger wasn't on his way inside, that we weren't about to be busted by a sleepwalker or a midnight snacker. I angled my body to make it look like I could just be staring into the fire too.

“Why are you trying to pretend that you don't recognise this place?”

He smirked at me, but I wasn’t buying it this time.

“I’m  _not_ pretending,  _clearly_ , as you seem to have worked it out.”

“Then why not just say?”

“Haven't I just?”

“What was this place? Why are you being weird about it?”

“I don’t have to tell you everything, Baby Rye. How much I wish to share in  _this_ moment, is  _entirely_ based on how much you know already.”

Well, it wasn’t exactly comforting, knowing he was hiding something. But I decided to bite the bullet and just give in.

“There were Peggie flags hanging from the ceiling when we first came here. I remember, because we burned them… and a picture of Joseph too. The pyre was taller than me, and all these people cheered at the sight of it. You already told me you were one of them. The Peggies. What’s so hard about saying you’ve been here before?”

He took a moment to think.

“And that’s all you know?”

“Mostly, yeah. Unless you’d like to share what you’re thinking with the class?”

He ignored me.

I sighed, too fucking tired from a long ass day to deal with his shit anymore.

“I might not have known you that long, flyboy, but I know that this is about more than just a couple of string lights. I wish you'd  _trust_ me. What am I gonna do? Stand on you again? Take you back up the mountain and leave you there? I’m gonna go get my drill out. You’re welcome to follow. Or just stand gawking here, for all I care.”

I turned on my heel and headed towards the stairs before he had the chance to respond. Before I could see the look on his face.

I'd come to regret that.

Now sulking, and back to muttering under his breath, he traipsed behind me all the way into the living quarters. It wasn’t like he had a choice. The draw from the bone fragment was too strong.

Soft snoring crept out between door hinges. The ochre glow of work lights peeked through where doors had warped with age, and one of the compound’s dogs, an elderly black Labrador, Marjorie, bundled around my feet, demanding love. I scratched her ears, and watched as she turned to seek the same from John.

“Guess dogs really  _can_ see ghosts.”

He crouched on his haunches and gave the thinning fur on her head a quick ruffle. She shook her coat, chilled, as though she had been out in a rainstorm.

I noticed he was left handed. I don't know why. 

We slipped into my room, where Selene was sprawled out across her bed, hair looking even more like there could be a raccoon holed up in it. She stank of burnt yucca and bear shit, and there was a smear of something across her cheek. I assumed she had spent another day working on guessing the antidote to rattlesnake venom, something we  _desperately_ needed.

“John, meet Selene. Selene, John.” I half-skipped over to my workbench and snapped the switch on the desk lamp. My drill was a thing of beauty, resting pride of place in the centre of the workspace. I’d made it myself when I was 13. Powered by tiny solar panels, small enough to take with me on the road, and sprayed the brightest shade of red paint I could find.

John settled himself by the door, leaning against the wall.

“Won’t the noise wake her?”

“Nah, she’s used to it.”

I shielded my eyes with a pair of scratched up goggles Selene and I shared, and set the bone shard on the desk. I had one shot. If I fucked it, like I’d already fucked so much today, John would probably be sent hurtling back to the rest of his body. And I’d have to traipse out there again tomorrow, feeling exactly like the idiot he probably still thought I was.

A deep breath.

I flicked the setting panel to ‘on’.

John watched me work, taking my time, trying not to breathe in the rising dust. The buzzing was gentle, my pressure light. Oh, I was well practised, precise, like I was when I sewed my wounds closed after doing something impulsive, like the time I set up a zipline off of one of Dad’s old hangars. I wanted to laugh at the memory of my rebuttal of Aunt Grace calling me ‘reckless’.

“You know, I realised halfway here, that you could just hide the bone in your bag.” John was clearly bored, and couldn’t be distracted by a snoring Selene any longer.

“Bags get lost, stolen, blown up. If it’s with me all the time, I can protect it. Also…” The harsh fluorescent light I was working under was making my eyes water, and I realised just how exhausted I was, “It’s more…  _special_ like this. It’s a symbol of our partnership, and every time I feel it around my neck, it’ll be a reminder to me of my promise to help you.”

I was so close. The drill had almost made it through, but I stopped to look over my shoulder at him.

“And you’re my  _friend_. Whether you’d like me to be or not. Whether you trust me or not. Whether you lie to me, or hide what’s really going on with you. It keeps you close to me, and it’ll still be with me even after…”

I couldn’t say it yet.

“Even after you’ve… you know.”

I resumed my handiwork, and in the reflection of the window, I saw his face soften, his eyebrows arching in surprise and mouth opening wordlessly. I pretended not to see it. I guessed Mr Drama wouldn’t want me to know just how much something so simple could mean to him.

The drill passed through the bone with a sudden energy that jolted me awake again.

“Ah ha!”

Selene snorted loudly and rolled over in her sleep.

I pulled the goggles onto the top of my head, and threaded the new pendant onto the cord, before retying the knot that made it infinite. The fragment of his skull now rested against that sternum he’d wanted to dissect earlier, and I tucked it neatly under my shirt again, so no one would ever know. It was weightless, like carrying air.

“Perfect! No awkward questions for me-”

“Carmina.”

“Huh?” I was so lost in my own head for a moment, hanging out with real world John, that I forgot that mid-way world John was still lurking behind me. “Yeah? What is it?”

He looked…  _guilty_?

“Earlier… my behaviour _._ This house. This  _room._ You, your family…” He glanced down at Selene, who was now drooling onto her pillow. “I have been here before. It was a base of operations for the Project. The owner of this house was... cast out, chased from his home by sinners. He had been  _told_ that he was chosen by God. But God did not see fit to bless him and bring him home. And now, his  _aggressors_ are seemingly God’s righteous and upright. To see they are… vibrant and…  _prospering…”_

He came to sit on my bed, a moonbeam shining straight through him onto the grimy rug beneath our feet.

“You’ve taken something I thought perfect. A place of rebirth, loyalty, promise. Ordered.  _Impeccable_. Impressive in every regard  _._ And you’ve filled it with a chaos. A… a  _light_. Something I barely recognise. Something that would pass through my fingers if I tried to catch it.”

“What are you trying to say John?” 

Oh God, I knew what he was going to say, but I had to ask. I couldn’t let it go.

“That you promised to take me home...”

He swallowed hard and stared at the wall opposite.

“And you  _have._ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for taking the time to read my mountain of words hahahaha! Next time on Icarus and Styx, it's a new dawn (pun totally intended)! Most likely gonna go tonally lighter in the next chapter I think, it's all been a bit intense! That being said, I do love drama...
> 
> Just a note about this chapter, I got totally lost remembering how Prosperity looks during all its upgrades, so it's just a weird mix of everything hahahaha. And I LOVED writing Sharky so much, he is definitely going to be in it again in the future!
> 
> Also, a reminder that the artwork was done by the amazing Ziorre (who you can find on Tumblr!)
> 
> As per usual, you can also find me on Tumblr at unclefungusthegoat, where I'll post the occasional update on how writing is going... but mostly it's just general screeching about John hahaha
> 
> Take care!  
> Chloe x


	8. John

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Greetings one and all! I'm a little early with this one, like nearly a whole week before I'd usually update at some point in the first week of the new month, but I was carried away after a sudden spark of inspiration and suddenly, it was done!
> 
> For anyone also interested, I've started a little side project- a John prison AU called 'The Whore of Babylon'! It focuses on my first OC, Olive Kestler, who goes to visit John on death row. It's much in the same vein as this, in terms of being angsty with touches of humour, and I'm aiming for 3 parts, although knowing me and my excessive word counts, it'll probably end up like 5 or 6 hahahaha! 
> 
> If it's of interest, please give it a read at the link below!
> 
> https://archiveofourown.org/works/20325931/chapters/48191419
> 
> Anyway, I hope you enjoy this new update! I hope it's OK!

For the first time in seventeen years, I’d seen a new dawn.

It was the same sky, the quiet stoicism of darkness eviscerated to let cornflower blue and peach sunrise spill through. The morning light rose from the universe’s gut, the moon and constellations swallowed and digested, nothing unusual, nothing changed. And it still soaked the land and all on her, living creatures and half-dead wanderers alike.

Only I watched it from Carmina Rye’s window.

The silhouette of my old home cut through it in different ways than the treeline of Black Horse Peak. Makeshift walls, unfamiliar trees and a slightly mouldy window pane remade the sky, and that sunrise, into something… _stirring._

I’d never been one to admire the natural beauty of Montana. On the contrary, I’d found it _unstimulating_ comparatively, when measured up to the metropolitan vivacity of Atlanta. But the first night here, when I’d resigned myself to sleep _outside_ , for want of the company of my brothers… the sight that greeted us- a thousand stars normally concealed by smog and light pollution from city towers- felt like a fresh start. As though the sky was baptising us, Cleansing the grime of Georgia from our souls.

This felt very much the same.

A new start… perhaps a new end, at least.

Last night, Baby Rye had offered to lay out a blanket for me, not realising that I was already asleep, in a way, and couldn’t go under _again_ . The night had become somewhat _awkward_ , as she dealt with the knowledge that she was a parasite within my house, feeding off of my misfortune, and in her clumsy, naive way, she was trying to make amends.

I was relegated to watching her sleep.

Apparently exhausted by the sheer effort of being in my presence, she’d curled up beneath her blankets and was asleep within minutes. I’d settled on the chair at her workbench, and did what I now did best… _waited._ I heard the black Labrador scratch at the door, whining to be let in. I perused Carmina’s collection of metal scrapings, rusty nails and sawdust. I tried to catch the bone dust that rose into the air from a draft coming through a hole in the wall. I watched the covers rise and fall as she breathed slowly. The air escaping her lungs whistled a little through her nose. She mumbled incoherently as she dreamed. 

Is this how Joseph felt when he’d kept watch over me as I detoxed cocaine out of my system, sweating and shivering through vivid, unshakeable nightmares?

 _Stressed_?

Almost as if the breath might suddenly stop?

However, now that it was mid-morning and I was outside, a view from the trenches as it were, seeing life in this commune in increasing detail, I’d have given _anything_ to be inside again, even having to endure the rat-tailed quack’s incessant _snoring._

Charlemagne Boshaw was out and about, bouncing the Drubman spawn on his knee, boasting loudly to everyone about their uniquely synchronised flatulence. No sign yet of any biological parents. Then again, the elder Drubmans- thankfully most likely in their graves- had hardly been model parental figures either. I wasted several minutes observing the women who passed by me, wondering which of them could have had the stomach to fuck their way into that family.

The whole place smelt of gasoline and dirt. 

Ugly creeping plants gnawed at the walls. Old tires from long destroyed tractors were stacked uselessly in a corner. Buttercup yellow paint was half slopped lazily onto the walls, _sloth_ rife amongst the artists who now sat flicking paint brushes at each other. Once a symbol of the strength of Joseph’s Project, a palace for a small empire, my home was now overrun with the sin that had destroyed me.

And if I had to listen to ‘Daydream Believer’, as presented by ‘HC’s Very Own Howard Stern… _Wheaty of What’s Left of the Whitetails’_ for a _third_ time in _two_ hours, I was going to cut off the rest of my mangled ear, the other one for good measure and march _myself_ back up to that motherfucking bunker. Anything to spare me the agonisingly dull and repetitive plight of ‘sleepy Jean’, apparently the only homecoming queen post-nuclear obliteration.

How did these people _listen_ to this shit?

But, alas, there I was. Suffering through. Unable to escape.

The black Labrador from the night before, _Marjorie_ apparently, was curled up, dozing at my feet, at the bottom of the raised flower box I leaned against. 

And the amulet made from my skull, oh so precious to my new ‘friend’, was tied to her collar.

“I have shit to do this morning. She’ll take you around. Keep you company.” Carmina had smiled warily at me, as she pulled off the boots she’d fallen asleep in to change her socks.

The grooves were still glittered with bits of _me._

“You’re _putting me out_ with the _dog?”_

“You’re welcome to stay here and stare at the walls all day. It’s that, dog-sitting, or watching me count how many pounds of beans and heads of lettuce we got.”

I chose the mutt.

She'd given me an uninformative guided tour, to say the least. 

There wasn't exactly much to see. Her morning circuit of the compound consisted of visiting workers for an eight to ten course breakfast, depending on who’d remembered to sneak something away from the kitchen. A scrap of turkey from a guy in a makeshift explosives lab, in the hangar once home to my own pet, _Affirmation_ , a beacon that called out my aphorism with every glint of its wings in the sun. An oddly shaped baby carrot from a woman knelt in a vegetable patch. An unidentifiable bone from the man patrolling the east wall.

Seeing her gnawing on it made me keep a close watch on _my_ bone, which dangled and swung alluringly between her front legs as she waddled to her next meal.

I don't know if I'd been expecting dirty secrets. Force of habit, perhaps. Catch a scandal or two in the making… but for what? I couldn't control these people anymore, had nothing to gain by toying with their lives. And even if I had wanted to, there was nothing to make even the most conservative of white Southern Baptist housewives clutch her pearls.

A couple squashed onto a single stool were making their way through the entire Backstreet Boys discography on a thankfully still tuned piano near the sleeping quarters (where it had come from, I could only guess. Neither I, nor my brothers held such a pastime. No, my parents had insisted I take up the _harp_. That was the third thing I’d enjoyed watching burn the night I killed my parents and set fire to my childhood home.)

There seemed to be a book club meeting loudly downstairs. Someone was arguing the merits of everyone being compelled into reading ‘Your Meat Is Neat’... which is _exactly_ what you think it is. I couldn't agree less. I think some things are better discovered _outside_ the pages of a book. But my heated retorts and corrections would have been lost on them in more ways than one.

Also, I would have had to admit I’d _read_ it.

And Kim Rye was sat with her head resting against the wall, slouched out the back of the house in probably a rare moment of solitude and serenity. Her eyes were closed. She was meditative, lost in thought, but the moment a wet nose nuzzled into her palm, she chuckled knowingly and produced a few slivers of celery from a pouch in her pocket.

“The world may change around us, Marj, but your insatiable appetite is a constant we can all hold on to,” she murmured as she fed the sticks one at a time into the awaiting mouth. Always so kind, so accepting. 

After all, she’d taken me in and fed me like a stray mongrel too.

I saw her eyes cast down.

She frowned.

“What's that-?” She delicately held my amulet in her fingers. She turned it over to see both sides.

I felt safe in her familiar embrace.

“It's bone… did someone make this for you to nibble on? That was very kind of them. Aren't you a lucky girl?”

 _No, it most certainly was not kind._ Well meaning, perhaps, but ill conceived on Carmina’s part. Giving a _dog_ a _bone_ and expecting her not to eat it. The Rye family dichotomic genes of intuitive and imbecilic certainly fought for dominance under that red beanie hat of hers.

Marjorie finished crunching her celery, licked Kim's face once for good measure and again, we were on the move.

“Go find Carmina, she might have something for you too!” Kim called after us.

When the breakfast rounds were done, and she'd settled where I now stood drinking the new world in, the weight of all I had seen, and their implications, became easier to bear. Clearer to comprehend.

At last, I understood why Carmina had not realised who I was. It was as if I had never lived at all, my touch scrubbed from the walls, footprints from the earth, my name and face from the memories of those who still remembered that time long ago. Even little things were gone. The windows where I'd pressed Holly’s naked back as I thrust myself deep inside her, so warm and tight and oh so _needy,_ were no longer steamed with our lust, but home to flowers in a small box. Seeds of life sprouting, but not within her.

I wondered if she had children with another man, almost adults themselves now.

Or if she had starved or burned or succumbed to cancers like the others.

And the one who brought the axe down upon my neck had also seemingly dissipated into nothingness.

I watched for _hours._

Hoping I'd see them crippled, in permanent _agony,_ perhaps mutilated by a wolverine, or half blown to bits by a pipe bomb. Or with _Wrath_ cut from them, my handiwork seen through by my brothers, or my Chosen. Or even an empty shell, whispering unintelligible tongues like my Mother used to do. Ripped apart inside by _shame_.

Searching for their face at every stop on our way.

But they never appeared.

Nick and Kim had been overprotective. Told her _nothing._ Neither had Grace Armstrong, or any other cockroach who had crawled out of the dirt and nested in what was once the paradigm of my existence. And without a Rook squawking about their heroic deeds…

I was forgotten.

I was cheated of my legacy by over-coddling heathens, who saw no irony in raising their daughter in a new hotbed of sin.

A county still healing after all these years. But their wounds were infected, swollen and oozing, sin trickling out of every orifice as they continued to fight, and fornicate and worship false gods.

Murderers and thieves, hypocrites all.

It seemed they only lived, because the balance of the universe had been righted, and the Deputy exiled or slain in my stead.

Every one of these people, _irredeemable_ . _Damned._

Well, all, perhaps, except...

Marjorie barked up at me, growling with disdain that I hadn’t scratched her ears in at least fifteen minutes.

“Quiet. I’m trying to brood…” I ordered, but my protests died in my throat as a thickly accented yell came out from the humble garage next to the gate.

“Marjorie? What ya’ barkin’ at, girl?”

And the owner of the voice, an all too familiar face, came strolling out from where he was making adjustments to a commandeered Highwayman truck. Far greyer now, hair still hanging loosely past his ears and beard still longer in some places than others, but the silver tinge about him and patched red cardigan gave him an endearing… well, _fatherly_ quality. Like the ones you'd see in movies. He looked so tired. But still, through the wrinkles, that beaming smile shone through, letting him seem as though he had not aged at all.

He was wearing that infernal cap.

Though now it was adorned with a lopsided patch that said ‘ _Rye and Daughter’_.

He took a moment to watch Marjorie yapping at what he would see as a trellised flower bed, with nothing but a few saplings wilting from thirst. Then he crouched to scratch her belly in an effort to quieten her. His hands, eternally rough from manual work, produced a calming audible rhythm as they passed through her thinning fur.

“Come on, girl, quit barkin’ at nothin’. You gon’ startle Nana, make her think there’s some forgotten fella on his way claimin’ alimony or somethin’. That ain’t good at her age, with her heart, an’ all.”

Ah, so the dog belonged to the lunatic who had spent the morning sat in front of the house stitching an ancient Christmas tree car air freshener onto her yellow and blue patchwork raincoat. She had seemed familiar, but I couldn’t be bothered to recall her name.

“It’s never too early for the Christmas spirit! Yooou never knoooooow which one’s gonna be your last!” She’d cooed at her needle and thread, peering at it over jam-jar glasses.

I knelt beside my old friend and looked him right in the face, still seeing his look of agony as I tore the skin from his sternum. Still feeling him tense under my grip as I hissed into his ear how I’d rip Baby Rye from Kim’s arms the moment she was born. Have her thrown from the statue of Joseph, dashed on the rocks below, like Astyanax at Troy. How I’d make them _watch_ my men feed their baby daughter to starving dogs, or how _I’d_ watch her fat barely formed limbs flail as I held her under the water until she drowned.

How I’d show him that the _sinful_ don’t deserve to be _parents._

“... Hello Nick.” I whispered.

He looked up. He looked at _me._ I still don’t know why. And for a second, I dared to hope, as his eyes met mine, that he knew I was there. He even seemed to instinctively move his hand towards his chest, to rub at the strip where a scar had to have settled deep.

I felt like _he_ was the ghost. A relic of a time long past. So old, next to me, eternally young. Somehow it seemed like he shouldn’t be here anymore, it had been so long.

Yet it _hadn’t_.

He was a couple of years younger than me. I couldn't help but try to conjure a ghost of my own. I had scoffed at Carmina’s jibes, but she was right. I would be nearly 50. What would John Seed look like, after five decades on this godforsaken planet?

My efforts were in vain. It seemed an impossibility, even as I tried to plagiarise my brothers’ faces, salvage their bone structures and maturing, sun-kissed skin for my morbid self portrait. But I couldn’t quite picture it. Something always seemed wrong.

And as I stared at Nick, attempting to construct this expression of what might have been over his face, I watched as his eyes rounded, morphed until they were just like mine, and the colour saturated, becoming icy blue and suddenly, it was as though as I was with...

_“John. A moment of your time?”_

_Joseph was stood in my office doorway, presenting himself as always with a dignified stance, hands folded formally in front of him._

_I'd been up all night writing and rewriting a watertight deed to Steele Farm, and was elbow deep in papers, maps and books on property law. The deed guaranteed the Project the farm’s extensive land, the timber that occupied it and, most importantly, its proprietors’ loyalty. It had been a thorn on an otherwise pruned rose in our Garden. Besmirching our growing reputation by holding fast at the foot of Black Horse Peak. Widower Jim Steele and his belligerent family of no less than ten children had time and time again refused to yield their lumber, refused to yield their souls...and had provided shelter to an outsider, a sinner, Alex, who was now festering on a table in my workroom, awaiting flowers to be planted in his opened throat._

_I hadn't been able to resist garroting him by my own hand. And I’d ensure, when the time came, that he’d be strung up by his ankles on the tunnel near their property._

_I was attempting to put together something with just enough menace that they'd come grovelling at my feet, but artfully phrased enough that it couldn't be submitted as incriminating evidence against me in court._

_If the deed wouldn't move them, I'd have to send in the Chosen._

_Only one remedy for an uncooperative lumberjack and the fruit of his loins, cowering in their wooden home._

_But in order to avoid such destruction of valuable assets, and souls, I'd committed a sleepless night to my work._

_I probably looked like shit. Pallid, with bloodshot eyes, my stomach laced with shots of espresso and a burn on my wrist. I’d shattered my ashtray against a wall in frustration a week ago, and hadn't wanted to stub the cigarette out on my new mahogany desk. So my wrist had sufficed. I remember being desperate to return to the ranch and fall into bed. Alone, for once._

_But you never say no to Joseph._

_“Brother!” I plastered a smile on my face. “Do come in! I'm just finishing up the Steele Farm deed of acquisition. I am certain that Jim will see the light this time. He will want his children to be saved, after all, once he fully understands what is at stake. It is only a matter of time!” I could hear the strained enthusiasm in my voice._

_Joseph did not even try to hide that he was unconvinced._

_“What is it that I can do for you?” I asked, wishing I didn’t have to._

_My older brother took a step towards me that felt dangerous. He is not a man of imposing stature, only just scraping 6ft, and eternally verging on emaciated, yet every moment he inhabits radiates with a divine energy that makes me tremble under his gaze._

_I could tell that he was not pleased._

_Again._

_“Tristan and Leah came to me last night. They confided in me. They are concerned.”_

_I decided to play the card I always play. Blissful ignorance. The two members of my Chosen who had turned Judas were fucked off that I had punished them for fornicating in a supply closet… when both of them were married to other people. They could have claimed any number of charges against me, and I wasn’t about to immediately imply to my brother that any of them could be true._

_“Concerned about what?”_

_“You.”_

_“Joseph, have no fear. Aside from the usual complaints, I am in perfect health-”_

_“Not your health, John. They told me that you have been neglecting your responsibilities. That there are… distractions.”_

_I had a pouch of ‘oregano’ and rolling papers stuffed at the back of my closet. A bottle of whiskey stashed behind the spare ‘YES’ signage. I fucked Holly twice a week, maybe, and Terry once a month. If I was lonely, but unwilling to risk a tryst, I’d use the fleshlight or dildo (depending on my fancy) I kept behind a hollowed out tile in the bathroom. And if I felt the need to repent for succumbing to these temptations, I kept a cat o’nine tails in a locked box under my bed._

_It belonged to my parents._

_I could never quite let it go._

_Idleness would have sparked suspicion to these dismal truths. Alerted others to the fact that I still clung to my vices when things proved difficult. I would never be so stupid as to let others see. Especially since they were last resort means of alleviating the pressures of being a Herald._

_“I am focused on my work. As always.” I declared, trying not to protest too much for fear of overcompensating._

_“Even when you are with Nick Rye?”_

_I felt my intestines knot. And they twisted, and bile rose and burned the back of my throat, as Joseph came to stand before me and gripped my upper arms. Even through my shirt, I could feel judgement seeping from his palms. Branding me like I was nothing but a common criminal._

_“Have you allowed yourself to become tainted again, John?”_

_“No, Joseph.”_

_“I have told you before, to love is not a sin. I accept your inclinations, and should you wish to commit yourself to another man, then you have my blessing. But I hear of your attachment to Nick. How you have been found sleeping in his hangar near him. How you follow him around, hold on to his every word. How you sit crushed together in a cockpit for hours on end. And I see only lust. Has Nick Rye awoken this in you again? Encouraged seduction?”_

_The accusation cut deep. I had worked so hard to overcome my addictions, to restrain myself. Why did my brother not have more faith in me?_

_“We are friends. That’s it.”_

_“You have not been nurturing carnal desires for him? Or for Kim?”_

_“No, Joseph.”_

_I made sure to hold his gaze. I could feel my sleep deprived eyes twitching with the strain of still being awake. But I had to show him, had to prove to him that I really was trying my best. And that was all I could ever do. I am a mortal man. I was not made to be perfect. Sometimes it truly felt like Joseph expected nothing less than Christ-like immaculateness of me._

_“I promise you, brother, in the sight of God, on my immortal soul, that I feel nothing more than friendship towards the Ryes.”_

_He backed away a little and seemed satisfied with that._

_But I knew he wasn’t going to let this go that easily._

_“Yet I sense that his greed also infects you.” He released me and turned away, running his hands along my new desk, walking the perimeter. Feeling the high quality wood, every grain a testament to my sin. It was too soon for dust to gather upon it, but still Joseph rubbed his fingers together, as if they had been made grimy by sheer association with it._

_I’d never lost my taste for the finer things in life._

_And he knew that._

_This was just a new excuse for whatever he was going to ask me to do._

_“He takes and takes, dragging you away from the time you should be devoting to the service of our family, claiming that time as his own. Hours upon hours. Days upon days. Tempting you with those aircraft he knows you admire so much. He has appealed to your vanity, recognised your shared need for material goods.”_

_He had arrived at the filing cabinet where I kept another small memento from my childhood. A cobalt blue tin aeroplane. It had a deep set ‘J’ carved into the belly of it. His gaze hovered on it, as if wanting to knock it from its perch with sheer willpower._

_“And the Project suffers for it.”_

_I had to answer very carefully._

_“I intend to bring Nick and Kim into our family. They are good people. Skilled, hardworking, genuine. Compassionate. Exactly the sort the Project needs. The kind who deserve to be saved.”_

_“Then why is it not done?”_

_“I- they do not yet fully understand the scope of what we are trying to achieve here...”_

_“Is that because they choose to be ignorant, or because you allow them to be?”_

_I hadn’t told them. How could I? I wasn’t ashamed of our work, quite the contrary. But we had been ostracised by so many before. Chased out of Georgia by people who feared us, trailed by law enforcement who itched to lock us away for any excuse. Already we were despised among the Hope County residents. Suspicion cast upon us by the churchgoing population, who claimed heresy and false prophets had come to decimate the community. Vitriol spat over watery beer by the Fairgrave family, who cursed our very names when Drew, their youngest, had joined our ranks. We were unwelcome in almost every local institution. Lorna, Aubrey and McCallough all hung signs on the door declining service to our flock._

_I didn’t want the Ryes to join that list._

_I didn't want them to hate me, to lose the only friends I'd ever really had._

_Joseph flicked at the propeller on the model plane and watched it spin as he waited for my answer. The moment dragged on, the fragile blades crawling to a jittery stop, the slight whistle they pitched emphasising my lack of reply. I wouldn’t lie to him. I had drowned in lies for far too much of my life. However, my honesty in this moment was best delivered in my silence. An implication of shame, though truly, I felt none._

_He sighed._

_“I don’t want to see you get hurt, John.”_

_He came back to me, and wrapped his hand around the back of my neck. He pulled me in, unyielding pressure at the base of my skull, and rested my forehead against his. It was an intimate gesture between us, and only us. Jacob never was subject to this firm grasp. It was one that had developed between us when I had tearfully admitted to being a drug addict. It was a comfort blanket, a sense that he would catch me should I fall._

_Even if being caught meant a broken neck._

_“The time has come to bring the Ryes into our fold. For them to learn of what it means to be a part of our family, and for them to renounce their sins. I would hate to see your heart broken if they were not with us when the Collapse begins.”_

_“I… yes, Joseph.”_

_“I don’t want to receive any more reports of your lack of focus. We all must sacrifice. When you are chosen by God, this is the way. For you, this sacrifice must be idle pleasures… and unproductive fixations. Do you understand?”_

_“I understand.”_

_“Cut their sins away. Mark Nick with the greed that defiles his good heart, that gnaws away at you too, and strip him of it. It is a mercy, John. A kindness. You know this. Do not let either of them run. If you are truly their friend, if you truly love them, you will do this. Do you love them, John?”_

_“Yes, Joseph.”_

_He kissed my forehead and suddenly I was alone again, to cough up the contents of my almost empty stomach over the polished manifestation of my disease, and the papers I’d now have to rewrite over yet another sleepless night-_

-The sound of my own retching ringing in my ears quickly faded to that of the mutt growling, and I was dragged from my thoughts by the sight of Carmina playing tug of war with an old rag. At some point in my daydreaming (and I thought of it as such because the opening chords of ‘Daydream Believer’ were starting up _yet again_ ), she had come out of the house to join me. In a stroke of rare intelligence, she was using Marjorie as cover, allowing us to be together without attracting uneasy looks as to why she would be talking aloud, or seemingly sat alone in the middle of the green.

Nick had vanished.

“I thought it best not to interrupt.” She answered an unspoken question, seemingly knowing that I was having yet another nostalgic episode. “And I think it’s also probably best not to ask?”

“You’re learning.” I returned her smile. 

“It’s a good habit of mine.”

I watched her bait the dog a little while longer as I sorted my thoughts, tried to smother Joseph's voice so it would stop ringing in my ears. It was like trying to ignore angels singing, the harder you denied their song, the louder they seemed to grow.

As promised, Baby Rye left me to it.

I had no doubt that the pain a subject endured during the atonement process was worth it. Pain had cleansed so many poisoned souls. Guided the lost and sick and helpless to a place of acceptance and unity and faith. Men who had murdered their wives, women who had embezzled their employees’ bonuses, teenagers who had kicked a homeless man to the edge of death. It had helped them all.

Saved them.

Saved _me._

At the time, I thought my reluctance to ask the Ryes to atone had simply been that I wanted to spare myself the ordeal of hearing Nick say ‘no’. I knew he would never agree to it. And the thought of shutting him out, sealing the bunker doors before his eyes and leaving him and all he held dear to evaporate in a firestorm...  it was _torment._

How could I hide below, knowing he was slowly turning to dust above me?

But now, reflecting, I knew that was not the case at all.

_Was blind, but now I see._

He and Kim. They were people I admired. Maybe, though I never quite understood it, people I _loved._ And I had loved them because of all the people I had ever met, of all the faces that I'd pressed into the dirt, the lives I’d destroyed, and the bodies I'd torn apart to get to the Garden, they were the most… _pure._ Unburdened by sin. Perhaps I watched through rose tinted glasses, but I saw love in their every moment. A willingness to share. Open hearts. A desire for peace and to protect each other. An effort to be the best they could possibly be.

It didn’t matter I thought Nick dumber than a bag of rocks, and Kim an idiot for putting up with him.

It didn't matter.

What need had they for _my_ help? How could a man who knew himself cursed, who secretly hated his own reflection, a man who could never measure up to them in _any way_ , have the nerve to preach imperfection to them?

In their way, they were perfect already.

And they’d welcomed me into their home, knowing that I might pollute it with my problems, yet having faith in me enough, trusting me enough to think that I wouldn’t.

They didn't believe I was evil.

Not at first.

 _That_ was why I never sought to open them and pull out what was inside.

Even to _save_ them.

It would have been _sacrilege._

And now, here _she_ was, the product of all that virtue. The child I’d threatened, in a last desperate claim for love from both Nick, and my brother. Sat beside me. Just as good, just as righteous. Just as impervious to the evils of the world.

And I’d kept her waiting far too long.

I cleared my throat to signal that I was content with the amount of sulking I’d indulged myself in that afternoon, and she cast a side-eye glance at me to show she was listening.

“So tell me,” I began, “Were the vegetables more enthralling than _my_ company?”

She won the rag from Marjorie, who was elderly enough to already be looking exhausted, and dangled it in front of the creature’s twitching nose. I noticed she spoke moving her lips as little as possible, angling her words out of the corner of her expanding grin.

“Hell yeah.” 

“Oh, _really_?”

“Yeah, honestly. You know, I don’t think there’s _anything_ more exciting in this world than a can of Traditional Sauce someone found with a fucking _bear claw_ stuck through the top.”

She sounded so genuine, so earnestly insistent and _excited_ that for a moment, I _believed_ her. I threw her a horrified expression, that her life could be so unbearably mundane that she found joy in such things. But then I saw her deadpan expression break, and the sarcasm leak through, crinkling the corners of her eyes first, then tilting her head, before coming to a crescendo with a raised eyebrow.

I couldn’t help but laugh.

_Openly._

And she laughed with me.

Laughing with no breath in your lungs is an unsettling sensation. Like you’ve inhaled molten gold and it’s solidified in your trachea, making your throat something rather like an organ pipe. One blocked by a fat little church mouse. But then, I’d lived through being violated by Sharky Boshaw last night. This was positively _pleasant_ in comparison.

“Hey, you know me. I have lots of friends with secrets.” She wiped tears from her eyes. I could now see Nick, back in the garage, looking over in her direction, frowning quizzically at her, and then around to see if her entertainer had wandered off somewhere. She noticed too and lowered her voice into a whisper punctuated with snickering. “There’s Selene with her mysterious medical degree, and Bean who literally could be an alien, his brain’s so far off this planet. And _now_ I have a can who won’t tell me why a bear would want to eat fucking tomato sauce.”

My sides hurt, open bullet wounds tugging as my muscles spasmed. I couldn’t remember the last time I laughed so hard. Might have been the time Wilhelmina Mabel threw a stuffed goose at me and called me a ‘disrespectful, swindling milksop’ when I’d attempted to procure her taxidermy for far less than its value.

This felt so… _freeing._

To sit with a friend and not have to be perfect for my brother, to make decisions and sign forms, or remember to get up to go to mass. To just be _stupid._

We sat in mutual hysterics for another minute or so, before we reached a comfortable silence. I glanced back at Nick, who was engrossed again in his work, torso being swallowed by an engine, on tip-toe because the truck, christened ‘Armadillo’ on a makeshift licence plate, was a beast of a vehicle.

Carmina saw me staring.

“Then there’s _you._ ” She went back to playing with the dog, “Mr ‘ _I don’t have a last name, and won’t tell you that I used to live here, and also I have a brother, didn’t I mention him before?_ ’” It was friendly hazing. But I could tell… she was getting tired of the dance we were doing.

“I-”

_Tell her John. Tell her who you are. Tell her what you did to her father._

“... you’ll hate me.”

She shook her head.

“I doubt that. You got blood on your hands… but so what? So do I. We’re co-pilots. We follow the skipper. Doesn’t make it right. But what is right anyway? We just fight to survive.”

_You’re a Seed. Own your sins. She says she won’t hate you. She’ll understand. She knows the depth of family loyalty. She’ll see that you had to do what you had to do._

_You did it out of love._

“I…”

 _Fucking tell her._  

“...I don’t _want_ to keep secrets from you, Carmina. But...” 

I couldn’t do it.

The last time I’d told a Rye the full extent of my character, it had ended with half his chest mutilated and stapled to the church wall.

“Then don’t.” She retrieved the amulet from around the dog’s neck and slipped it back over her own. That yielded a sigh of relief from me. I wouldn't be Marjorie’s eleventh breakfast. “Can I tell you my biggest secret? Aside from the whole ghost thing?”

I nodded.

“New Eden? I don’t get it. Why we can’t work together. Why we’re so close but so far apart. Why no one can seem to forgive each other. Put their egos aside for just one second, so we can fight the Twins _together_. I don’t think it has to be this way-”

She was cut off by the rumble of an engine, guzzling whatever passed for fuel these days, as it screeched up the hill towards the front gate. Horns blared in obnoxious unison, and the repetitive spatter of gunfire ricocheted through the air, mounted guns on the vehicles perhaps, or assailants duel wielding SMGs and not giving a fuck if they shot their own men. Wasting ammunition is the first thing you _don’t_ do when on the offence. Removes the element of surprise. And each bullet squandered is a bullet closer to coming up empty mid combat.

Jacob would have fed these morons to his Judges.

“Shit!” Carmina’s face fell with the purest form of terror I’d ever seen, even from those who I’d come face to face with in my workshop. “Not again, we’re not ready… _MOM-?_ ” She abandoned her dog-mauled cloth and joined the fray of scrambling Prosperity residents.

I watched her snatch up an assault rifle and load it with a new magazine.

All I could see was Jacob, still a boy, armed and sent off to war.

The whooping and hollering got increasingly closer, testament to just how immature the advancing fuckwits were, until the engines halted. The calm before the storm, the pause as the warriors of Prosperity braced themselves for a fight, lasted barely a minute, as the sound of two sets of heavy boots hit the dirt, and a see-sawing voice echoed out across the parapet.

“Listena that, Lou. All tucked up in their hidey hole. Real quiet. Pretending they ain’t there. Playing _dead_.” 

“Won’t be _playin’_ for much longer, Mick.”

The young woman- Mickey- let her voice hitch into a cry that dripped with arrogance, that reeked of gluttony. Her soul, gorging itself, growing fat on the suffering of others.

“The foxes can hear you breathing, rabbits! Hear you squeaking in the dirt! See… we’re the farmers of this fucking valley...”

A gun cocked loudly, too close for comfort.

“You bin’ eatin’ all our cabbages… and the bill is _fuckin’ due_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I actually upset myself writing this one hahaha. I love the John/Nick relationship and I've always wondered why he branded Nick 'greed', when wanting to keep the plane never really seemed a solid enough excuse. And so this chapter was born. And I really do believe John loved them, in his own way. He just loved his family too and had to do his job, and he did really want to save them. Sorry if it was a bit gushy!
> 
> Also haha the Daydream Believer repetition is a bit of an inside joke with me and my sister. We go wild whenever it repeatedly plays in New Dawn, it's EVERYWHERE because there's literally like 10 songs in that game hahaha
> 
> But anyway, I digress! I hope you enjoyed it, and stick around for Chapter 9- Carmina and THE TWINS. (Had to get them in at some point!)
> 
> And, as usual, you can find me on Tumblr at unclefungusthegoat!
> 
> Take care,  
> Chloe x


	9. Carmina

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bonjour tout le monde! Welcome back to a very long-overdue Icarus and Styx chapter 9! God, it's been ages since I updated, but I have numerous excuses hahahaha
> 
> 1 - I'm back out in France working again, so that's taken a bit of adjusting. We're in quite an intense rehearsal process at the moment, and I've been a bit too knackered to write, plus I've got loads to learn. But once I'm through that, I'll be able to do it a lot more!
> 
> 2 - This is a fight scene and fight scenes are HARD hahahahaha
> 
> 3 - I participated in Far Cry 5 Week on Tumblr, and wrote four short one-shots for it! If you fancy reading about any of the following, please give them a read: POV of an angel, runaway teenage John Duncan meeting Jacob, Chad Wolanski just being Chad, and a burial fic featuring alternative eulogies. All can be found on my profile!
> 
> As per usual, I'm not massively happy with it, but you guys are seriously owed a chapter, I have no idea what else to do it it and if I didn't stop being a perfectionist, I'd never get anything done hahahahaha
> 
> Anyway, I digress and I hope you enjoy!
> 
> ALSO WARNING: Graphic violence!!!! Gory stuff!!! Dead people!!!

We weren’t ready for another attack.

The last time the Highwaymen had come knocking at our gate, we’d lost eight people and the remote explosives they’d set took out half the north wall. I remember the residual stench of melting plastic and decomposing bodies made me feel sick for days. And the heat of the blaze had been so unmerciful, that all we could find of the lookout who'd been on sentry duty was the warped leather of her boots, a row of teeth still embedded in half a faceless jaw, and a locket with a sketch of her two kids in it that had somehow survived.

There’d been no one to give it to. 

Her family had all been wiped out. 

The ones who hadn’t been slaughtered in the regular sieges on our home, had been decimated by winter sickness. They’d lived through battle, only to die from the bitter cold and infections we just didn’t have the knowledge to fight. It wasn’t  _ fair _ . It was so  _ pointless.  _ But, I guess, in the end, at least they were together. She’d been so lonely after her second son had gone, lonely enough that even though we couldn’t recall where we’d buried the boys, we’d tucked the locket into the toe of her boot, and buried them all in a little grave under a tree.

As soon as I heard Mickey and Lou sounding the cry for battle, my hands started shaking.

Was it finally my turn to be reduced to ashes? Entrails and lumps of smouldering flesh? And maybe all they'd find of me would be John’s amulet, and Mom would wear it around her neck, forever thinking she had the final piece of her daughter close to her heart.

I tried to breathe.

That  _ rush  _ of anxiety. 

It didn’t matter how many times I had been through this. How blood almost literally watered our crops, and that I’d probably end up with whittled bullet casings for teeth someday (hey, it happens if your face gets hit with the butt of a rifle enough times). It didn’t even matter that I had a  _ ghost  _ stood next to me, showing me that I wasn’t exactly facing a great beyond of nothingness and empty silence. My energy, my soul would end up somewhere. But nothing ever prepares you for the knowledge that you’re most likely going to be dead in the next few minutes.

And nothing prepares you for how it feels to  _ kill  _ someone.

You can never give a life back once you take it. A life is such a fragile, fleeting thing, that it’s meant to be something that’s never yours to take in the first place. 

Being  _ there _ , anticipating that fatal first shot, wondering who was to die first, trying to recall the faces of any of the bodies I’d left in my wake, my confession to John that I'd been raised to think nothing of killing, that taking a life should be second nature, came crashing down upon me.

I’d stolen so many, I’d lost count years ago. Every way I looked at it, I was a thief, a dirty red-handed  _ highwayman, _ who stole lives on the road, no different to the rowdy fuckers about break down our gates. Why was I standing here, weapon raised to blow their heads off, pretending to be so morally superior? Pretending like I wasn’t just like them?

But I just had to tell myself… there was  _ one  _ difference. One thing that set me, my Mom, my Dad, Aunt Grace, Uncle Sharky,  _ all of us, _ apart from the enforcers who kept people in cages and nailed corpses to upturned cars.

This wasn’t who I  _ wanted  _ to be. It’s who I  _ had  _ to be.

Someday, I’d be better. Someday, I’d live somewhere surrounded by all things living. Grow a garden or something. Let my hands do something other than stain myself with the same warpaint as Mickey and Lou. I think I'd fill it with plants other than beans and yucca and squash though. Maybe a cactus or two. Or one of those flowers that yawns and eats flies. And I'd pilot my own handbuilt plane over it, water it and watch it grow from the sky. Yeah, that’d be cool. 

Because who the hell would could live like  _ this  _ forever _? _

“If you need it, I’ll have your back,” John was beside me, and his voice pulled me back from my pre-combat meditation. It was weird to think that just a few days ago, I thought he was going to hurt me. And now here we were, side by side, brother and sister in arms, literally staring down the barrel of a dozen guns.

“You’d better, flyboy, or else you’re hauling your own ass to the afterlife.” 

Making sure no one was watching, I gave him an uncertain smile. 

I was only half joking.

He was trying to digest the image of me, crouching behind a raised flower bed, with heavy weaponry in my hands, attention firmly fixed on how quickly I could ready a gun for battle. He even  _ knelt  _ beside me, despite having no reason to. 

If Uncle Sharky went through him, so would machine gun rounds.

“Not exactly the most elegant of potential last words, Baby Rye. Hardly St Crispin’s Day was it?”

_ Someday he’ll find that I’m doing something right. _

_ Even if it’s saying goodbye. _

But somehow, his pretentious asshole commentary sounded half-hearted. Like the words came spilling out, as usual, with the aim of making me look stupid, a child with an oversized gun who had no place on the battlefield. But this time, they held no weight, no passion or effort behind them. It was more like…  _ concern. _

Remembering how last night, he’d screamed about his mother, about the way she'd hurt him, I wondered how many battles  _ he'd  _ faced as a kid. Not literally, of course. The type of fight that involves crying through the night when no one can hear you, and rubbing alcohol on your own cuts because no one else will do it for you. 

Seven years old and you know what blood tastes like. Eight, or nine, and you realise you want to hurt them back. Eleven and twelve, you’re hurting small animals because no one ever told you it wasn’t right. By the time you get to being fourteen or fifteen, you’re a lost cause.

I’d seen several kids pass through with the same story. You could always tell which ones they were. Something about the eyes, and the way they laughed. Because there’s only one casualty in a fight like that, and there's often no body to prove it.

I didn’t have time in this moment to hope that John hadn’t been  _ that  _ kind of a child soldier. 

He had every sign of it written on his face.

But hope I did all the same.

“ _ Crispin _ ?” I sighed, “I’m just going to pretend like I know who that is…” I was only half listening, trying to calculate just how many seconds we had before all hell broke loose.

“Cretin.” He drawled, still not taking his attention from my fingers expertly working the machinery of my weapon, “ _ Shakespeare _ ? Henry V. Patron Saint of-.”

His voice faltered as a heavy ramp was rammed into the wall with a ear-splitting crunch, and the brakes of a half-cannibalised truck squealed. A triumphant roar came from our oncoming adversaries, slightly muffled by the armoured helmets that were the biggest pain in the ass I’d ever known. I made sure to double check that I’d put armour piercing rounds in the magazine. Otherwise I’d be aiming for the knees, and that’s not exactly a one shot kill.

He didn’t finish making his point.

I don’t think he’d quite grasped the firepower the Highwaymen had when I told him before.

“Don’t let me die not knowing how that sentence ended, John.” I badgered him, as I made my final checks, lining up the gun on the precipice of the flower bed, peering through the scope at where I planned to fire first.

“I…” Was he  _ stuttering?  _ “I… I feel  _ the swarm of caterwauling barbarians  _ is more of a pressing matter, Carmina-”

I wasn’t going to let him off that easy.

“I wanna know! Patron Saint of  _ what _ ?”

God, it was so fun messing with him.

He gave me the most exasperated look I’d ever seen not on my Mom.

“It’s entirely irrelevant, and I’d rather your head be filled with more important things at hand, like how to dodge  _ bullets- _ ”

“ _ John-” _

“Let’s not talk about this  _ now _ -”

“For  _ once  _ in your goddamn life, John,  _ tell me what you’re thinking _ , or I swear to your God that I’ll stand on a grenade-”

“ _ Teenagers-” _ He groaned from deep within his chest, “You know what? Fine.  _ Shoemakers _ . He’s the Patron Saint of  _ shoemakers _ . Happy? Ready to get shot now in full and unparalleled enlightenment?”

I took pride in my first victory of the day. I wasn’t entirely sure if it would be my last. Thought I’d savour it while I could, and enjoy the fact that I’d actually managed to get something out of him for once. What was it with him and not wanting to share? With never quite giving a whole story? With  _ secrets?  _ It was  _ really _ starting to get old. Maybe I’d have to come up with a few more of my own. Pay him back with  _ my _ silence and a hundred annoying ‘I-could-tell-you-but-I-won’t’s.

I adjusted my body to maintain my balance, finger resting on the trigger, braced for the recoil and the inevitable bruise on my shoulder.

“Oh great, well drop your guy Crispin a prayer and maybe no Highwaymen will steal the boots off my corpse-” I shot back, wishing that for once, all I would shoot were words.

A smoke grenade was catapulted over the wall, and landed near the cartography studio. It hissed and spluttered an ugly sea green haze, like the Bliss that makes you see tongueless farmers and pretty girls in white dresses. A yellow hat danced, and arms flailed as the totally hapless, but (and don't tell anyone I said this) oddly sweet Bean stumbled down the disappearing stairs to go hide in one of his other ‘safe’ spots.

Out of the corner of my eye, as the smoke slowly drifted between us, I could feel John's eyes fixed on me, just watching me. The pale green was mixing and swirling in his own translucent colours, becoming a part of him as he was now a part of the air. I adjusted my rifle in my grip, ignoring how slippery the metal already felt in my sweat slicked palms.

I sent a last, reassuring look his way.

And I saw the  _ fear _ in his face. 

Not for him.

For  _ me. _

And, with alarming sincerity, like it was an unbreakable holy truth straight from the gospel of Joseph Seed, he said _ : _

“Please don't die.”

Not for the first time in my life, I made a promise to live for my family. And yeah, John was family now. He was yet another weird uncle.  _ Uncle John _ . It sounded right in my head, like that's the way it was meant to be. I wasn’t exactly sure I was ready to say it out loud yet. He’d probably think I was passing comment on his ‘old man’ status again and I’d already woken up once to him preening himself in the reflection of a spoon I'd balanced on top what remained of yesterday's bowl of chicken soup.

But then, a part of me kinda thought he'd actually appreciate it.

Feeling like he was one of the Ryes again.

“If I do die, at least I’ll have you for company.” I didn't stop my voice from quivering. Before I went to the great junkyard in the sky, I kinda wanted to show him that I wasn’t  _ all _ warrior princess of the apocalypse.

I was kinda, sorta, really, a scared little girl.

And he smiled at me.

“I wouldn't wish that on you. Even  _ I  _ wouldn’t want to be stuck with me  _ forever-”  _

A bullet whipped past my head, strands of my hair blowing loose, like a spider's legs on a speeding car’s windscreen, and embedded itself into the wooden wall behind us. It splintered, and I felt some of the sawdust residue prick at the side of my face, tasted it on my tongue. We both instinctively ducked and returned our attention to the swarm of Highwaymen now crowning the walls.

Fuck, it looked like they'd brought  _ all  _ their firepower with them. 

I'd never even  _ seen _ the like of some of the weapons they were pointing at us. Prototypes, probably with faster reloading. More rounds per second. Increased accuracy. Ammunition that could take down a bison. Everything that made it harder to walk away from. I couldn't help but see them balanced in their arms, and know that they had been born out of enslavement and torture down at the old jail.

With faces floating in front of my eyes, I aligned the scope with the cocksure enforcer at the front. He was swaggering and calling back over his shoulder, gun not even readied.

My jaw clenched.

My hurried breaths steadied.

I waited until he faced forward again, preparing for the onslaught.

And I  _ fired _ .

His head snapped back as the bullet passed straight through the visor on his helmet, and buried itself in his right cheek, just below his eye. A rapid spattering of blood as his flesh burst open concealed his startled final expression, and though I regretted that I  _ wanted  _ to watch it, there was something about wiping that smarmy smile off of his face, by removing his face entirely, that felt so fucking satisfying.

_ God, I am the child of a world gone to shit. _

As he crumpled to the ground, another horde were coming up behind him, and I lost myself in the rhythm of the gunfire, cutting them down like I was harvesting wheat. I could hear myself screaming, roaring, expelling all my pent up anticipation and shame and bloodlust and the percussion of bodies slamming on top of each other and the ring of shotgun casings bouncing as they dropped and the oozing of opened chests… who knew death could sound just like music?

I aligned my next shot with the exposed throat of one of the Highwaymen’s low level foot soldiers, the more recent recruits armed with the shitty, old, more familiar guns and worn through armor. I swear there was still blood on there from the last guy who'd died in it.

Squeeze, release, hold my breath-

The force of impact threw him back into the guy standing behind him, sending him topping from the wall.

It would have been funny if it wasn't so horrific.

And on and on it went. I stole their lives, their hopes and goals and loves and families from them, with no care for who they were, or how they'd come to be in Hope County, or if they had a Mom like I did, hoping they’d come home with more than three working limbs. 

With each crack of burning hot metal cutting through air, bone, muscle, didn’t fucking matter so long as it did, each time I looked to see if they’d all stand up again.  _ Ghosts _ . Only half there, like John. Refracted glints from scopes in the sun passing through just as the bullets had. If I’d be cursed not only to see the ones who died at my parents’ hands, but at my  _ own _ .

But not one of them did.

“SHIT, THEY’RE SURROUNDING US-” someone yelled.

I heard thumping footsteps behind me and Uncle Sharky came charging past. He whooped as he released a searing blast from his flamethrower, angled towards the grappling hooks that were clinging to the wall near La Grosse Patate. Roger went running after him, still firing his handgun to protect our home, but obviously concerned that his pride and joy would end up  _ La Patate Flambée. _

Honestly, I’m constantly surprised that it already  _ isn’t. _

As I turned to shield my eyes from a grenade blast somewhere to my left, I saw a mischievous curiosity flash through John’s eyes… before he put a leg out in front of a rogue Highwayman who’d broken away from the main pack to follow Roger. 

To anyone not an active participant in my pretty exclusive ghostly realm, it probably looked like she’d suddenly learned how to fly mid-step… or forgotten how to walk. Her feet danced out from underneath her and she landed on her face, chin connecting with the edge of the steps to the medical wing with a painful snap. Teeth broke free from her bloody mouth as it lolled open, tongue swelling where her molars had clamped down onto it, her eyes rolling back into their sockets. The force of impact shuddered through her body. Twitching. Writhing. Then nothing. 

Roger’s head whipped back at the sound. He saw me still crouching behind the flowerbed, and the upturned, maimed Highwayman, and putting two and two together, made five. Five  _ hundred _ .

“ _ Bon travail _ , Carmina!” He winked at me, despite the fact that my leg wasn’t anywhere near her.

“... Uh….”

“Stay safe, and keep your head down, petite oiseau!”

And just like that, he was gone again, Quebecois trash talk merging with Uncle Sharky’s maniacal laughter. I could feel John’s pout burning through the back of my head, as he watched him go.

“The ingrates in this Valley  _ never  _ appreciated my work-” He sniffed, brushing off his jeans as if the dirt that was matted onto them was from his efforts in battle, rather than from whatever puddle he’d died in. I was too busy sending a couple more rounds into a guy’s stomach to tell John that it wasn’t exactly Roger’s fault... and too panicked by the sudden hollow click from my gun.

My magazine was empty.

I’d been wasting bullets.

_ Fuck. _

I had to spend precious seconds fumbling for a new one. It slid in with a satisfying, neat mechanical ping, a tiny detail in this crazy cacophony, this  _ chaos.  _ You know, that’s the kind of thing you remember during a fight. The unimportant things that normally you’d just overlook. Because all the important stuff, a death rattle in a bullet riddled chest or the squelch when you stand on someone’s brains, can be too much to bear.

Think about that all the time, and you’d go crazy.

John was suddenly screaming at me-

“ _ Carmina-!” _

I turned just in time to see the knife heading for my skull. I ducked, briefly abandoning my rifle and hurled my arms around the Highwayman’s legs, tackling them out from under her. We tangled together as she went down,  _ hard.  _ I could hear her wheezing behind her mask, the breath knocked from her lungs. The knife sprang from her hand as her palm opened and it slid across the grass, out of reach, before being kicked away by a pair of legs running back towards the main house. Great, deadly weapon out of the way.

Now all I had to do was get  _ her _ out of the way.

“FUCK-” She spat, and grabbed for my head, taking hat, hair and skin in her grip. I kicked anywhere that I could reach, bruising her shins, knees, ankles, an elbow in her ribs, an elbow in mine. There we lay, wrestling like weasels over fresh roadkill. A stray elbow thrown cracked her scarlet visor and as she pulled it from her head, I saw that she was probably not much older than I was. Dirty blonde hair cut badly with scissors. Pretty, in a kind of feral, sadistic way. Kind, deep down, behind the eyes. Maybe we would have been friends in another life.

_ Now… if only I could get the knife from my boot. _

I jabbed a fist into her stomach.

“Doing well, my dear!” John sounded almost like he was enjoying this a little too much, now that he’d seen that I wasn’t some useless wallflower who couldn’t last in a fight.

“Yeah? Marks out of ten?” I grunted.

He wasn’t even watching me anymore, instead quickly ogling over at my Mom, who had just blasted a guy’s head off with a shotgun at point blank range.

The Highwayman was confused enough, thinking I was talking to her, to loosen her hold on me for just a moment. I rolled so she lay crushed under my weight and I felt her nose shatter as I slammed the back of my skull into her face. I knew, if I survived this, my brain would hurt for a fucking week. There was blood trickling down my neck, soaking the back of my shirt, and she was howling in pain.

I’m not gonna lie and say I hadn’t hoped the fragments of her nose would be thrust back into her brain. A quick death, not without pain, not merciless or merciful.

Honestly? A  _ cowardly  _ kill.

Because since I had missed, I had to look her in the face and  _ watch  _ her die.

I clambered on top of her, my palm splayed across her wide nose and flushed cheek. She snarled at me, baring her teeth, but I pressed her head into the dirt, using my other arm to pin her down, my knee buried in her stomach. I saw a flicker in her eyes. She knew she was fucked if she didn’t get free. Her arms and legs started flailing, and I desperately tried to ignore the blossoming bruises that stung every time she landed a hit.

I couldn’t reach my knife  _ and _ hold her.

But… maybe?

_ “Uh... John… little... help… boot?”  _

This dopey expression crossed his still sulking face. Having seen me tuck the blade into my left boot, he knew exactly what I was getting at, but even though he'd just tripped a Highwayman and watched her bleed out, this somehow seemed an impossibility.

“Are you sure that will  _ work _ ?”

My ensnared prey was thrashing, my palms sweaty against her.

“ _ No… but…” _

“Perhaps I could try to _ - _ ”

“ _ JOHN- _ ” I was fast losing strength, feeling exhaustion creeping into my muscles. Becoming heavy, soldered to my bones. I wouldn't be able to hold her much longer and there was no chance I'd be able to fight back if she put her full weight on me. That girl was  _ muscular. _

Focussing all my willpower into one arm, my left hand grabbed at the air behind me, just waiting for John to move his ass and hand me the killing blow.

I barely felt the tiny blade slide up over the loosening knots of my knitted socks, but suddenly, there it was in my outstretched hand, and the Highwayman’s face was even more twisted, startled by the sudden telekinetic powers I’d seemed to have developed. 

I grabbed her chin, dragged her face so she was staring up at the sky.

And let my wrist fall.

The knife sank into her eyeball and she went limp under my grasp. I felt her last breath evaporate against my skin, hot moisture cooling into nothing. It was so intimate, for someone who I knew nothing about. I wondered if John and the guy who’d hunted him down had shared such a moment, if one day I'd be on the other side of it. I wondered what her name was. If I’d ever know.

When I knew she was dead, I rested back a little, catching  _ my _ breath. 

“It appears that I am the ghost of many talents.” John smirked. He took a little bow, and if it was even possible, he’d never looked more smug.

I felt myself wiping the spray of blood from my face.

“Talents like being as argumentative as possible in all the worst moments?”

We laughed together, and for a moment, it felt like we were just out on the mountaintop again.

“Hey, you think what’s-his-name Saint Shoe kept knives in his-?”

A loud explosion erupted behind me, and my ears rang with a reverberating whine that made my aching brain throb. Heat scorched my hair, made me want to rip the hat from my head and my scalp with it. I found my face next to the face of the Highwayman’s corpse beneath me where I’d thrown myself down. Shrapnel shot above me, the remains of an iron fire pit. Seconds earlier, and it would have probably taken my head off. It clattered to the ground around me, and something hot and heavy sliced my leg open through my jeans. Not deep, but deep enough. 

I couldn’t breathe.

The smoke was thick, clinging to the inside of my mouth.

Coughing, gasping, choking, my throat closing over, pressing down as close to the ground as I could get to try and find a breath.

Somewhere, someone was calling my name.

And everything seemed… out of place. Like there were pieces missing.

Any second now, someone would probably come, see my squirming and put a bullet in my back. I had to get up, but I was just so fucking  _ tired. _

_ I thought about just closing my eyes and letting go. _

But a cold hand crept onto my shoulder and it jolted me back into the present.

“Are you hurt?” 

My eyes were watering, I could barely see John beside me.

“No… no, I-” My stomach backflipped, and I realised why everything felt wrong.

It was  _ silent. _

There was this terrifying silence, consuming us, louder than the ringing screech after the bomb... before the yelling started. Before the survivors were starting to be rounded up.

A chilling, victorious laugh echoed out across Prosperity.

And then another.

And I knew.

We’d  _ lost. _

_ Again. _

John grabbed desperately for my arm and pulled me up so I was sitting.

_ “ _ Carmina,  _ hide- _ ” It was written all over his face. He was watching someone making their way over to me, checking for survivors to put out of their misery. I was aware that my eyes were glassy, threatening to shatter, as I realised that this was  _ it _ . They were never going to let us live after this. We were too much of a risk, rabbits who kept chewing through the seeds of chaos they planted. Always fighting back. Since they'd arrived in Hope County, we’d taken out more of them than they had of us.

But I couldn't fight back this time.

My gun was out of reach.

My knife still rammed through the Highwayman’s skull.

I couldn't take them all on  _ and _ save everyone, even with John beside me. Someone would get killed if I did something reckless and I was already burdened with guilt that I wasn't somewhere out east, on the road searching for Thomas Rush. Guilt that I hadn't managed to stop this. That even just one more person had to die.

My heart couldn't take anymore.

And so I did what I’d hoped I’d never have to do. In the hope that maybe, just maybe, they'd let us live.

_ I gave in. _

“There’s nowhere I  _ can  _ hide...” I whispered, defeated.

A long shadow cast across me, and I could feel someone standing behind me. The hem of my shirt garrotted my windpipe, as I was dragged out from where I was hiding. I offered a rushed prayer to John's God, but everything was so scrambled and panicked, that all I could think of was the hymn he’d taught me, hours before, when everything had seemed hopeful, 

“Get the  _ fuck _ down, scab-”

I was hauled down the steps to the grass, and forced to my knees. Where I hit the ground, I felt blood soaking into my jeans, still hot and sticky from where it was leaking from a shot out throat. It was Casey, old and half-deaf, the residue of today’s lunch smeared on his apron, and his hands were still clutching his rifle, kitchen knife screwed to it as a makeshift bayonet. And there it was again. That  _ smell _ . Metal and ash and human guts that smelt a little too much like fish, and sour filth where bowels had released and the dying had soiled themselves. 

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the line up stretched along the entire green.

The people of Prosperity, literally on our knees.

_ Oh God, where were my parents? _

Turned out Mom was halfway up the line, a Highwayman arm around her neck in a chokehold. A purple bruise was already blooming over her right eye and on her jaw, and there was a shallow gash in her hairline. Even from where I was knelt, I could see her sigh in relief when she saw me still breathing. I gave her a small nod. Our code for ‘ _ I’m not hurt’.  _ I hated how guilty she looked. Guilty that here we were again, at the Twins’ mercy. It wasn’t her fault they kept coming back, that we kept having to fight for our lives and more often than not,  _ lost.  _ That they culled us like we were vermin… like  _ rabbits. _

But I couldn’t hold her hand, and tell her that someday, we’d be  _ free _ . No more fighting. No more sacrifice. That it would all be for  _ something.  _ She’d be able to grow old in peace. Husband and kids and grandkids and great-grandkids at the bedside when her time finally came. But I couldn’t, I just couldn’t, because...

Because...

_ Where the fuck was Dad? _

“You lot seem to keep breedin’. Makes for a good hunt, but feels like we got not a lot a’ time for much else these days-” Mickey sauntered to centre stage, pulling her helmet off and thrusting it into the arms of a bruiser armed with nothing but brass knuckles. Her blue sweatshirt was spotless, meaning she’d been firing from afar… or just stood and fucking watched.

We probably weren’t worth her time.

Definitely not her life.

We were lower than the dirt beneath her boots. We were worms, and she was standing on us until we burst.

Mickey patrolled the line, before bending at the waist in front of Gina, to grin hard into her face. She’d had Blade a little while ago, but her stomach was still swollen and her centre of gravity was off. Didn’t mean she couldn’t hit a moving target though. She was the best of us. Once one of  _ them.  _ And they knew that. Like Mom, she was being held in place. Only she had  _ two  _ enforcers on her, one gripping her face so she couldn’t spit or lacerate their leader with her teeth, the other with a gun rammed into her back, angled down to where it would pass straight through to what they thought would be her unborn baby.

“Oh, we all about dirty blood. Purity is a  _ disease _ . We gotta world a’ anarchy. A world a’ succulence and chaos and if you ain’t ready to have it runnin’ through your veins, then it ain’t right you being in it.”

She pulled away and surveyed the reapings of her hunt. Like we were  _ trophies _ .

“But being a  _ traitor?” _

Her hungry eyes moved from Gina onto Selene, Tyler, Portia, Aunt Grace, Evie, along to Bean, Danny, Yolanda, Mikey, Uncle Sharky and Roger, and on and on and on, but still no sign of-

“Being a scrounger? A  _ cockroach _ ? A  _ maggot  _ on our land? That’s a kinda dirty we don’t appreciate. Right Lou?”

_ No, no no no- _

Lou came into view. She had my Dad by the back of his shirt, arm twisted behind him. I could see the discomfort written all over his face with every pang of his muscles pulling when he moved too far out of her grip. She pushed him to kneel in front of her sister, and I couldn’t remember a time when Dad looked so  _ angry. _ So  _ defiant. _

_ Please don’t do anything stupid, Dad. _

“I got a scout who says you know your way ‘round an engine. Is that right?” Mickey hummed at him.

Nothing.

I wondered if the last time Dad was on his knees, was in that Peggie ritual, having the skin flayed off of his chest. If he was forcing his mouth shut now to keep the rest of it.

“What’s this bozo’s name again?” Lou scrunched his arm behind him further, and I heard a soft grunt escape him. 

“Nick Rye.” The sound of my Dad’s name in Mickey’s mouth just made me want to punch it out of her so she’d never  _ dare _ say it again.

“Answer the fucking question,  _ Nicky.  _ You good with engines or  _ what? _ ”

He kept his mouth shut, avoiding my stare, and Mom’s. We would be leverage for the Twins if he reminded them of just what a tight family unit we were. Mickey crouched in front of him and I knew that if I was in Dad’s shoes, it would have taken everything not to have headbutted her right there. He was still wearing his Rye and Daughter shield-shaped patch on his hat, and the sight of it there, half hanging off, made me hope that there was such a thing as magic, or God, or some other power, that could impart some kind of protection onto it. Make it into true gold, not just the colour of it.

“See, right now, you’re a problem maker. You and your people. And we gotta lot a’ engines need fixing. Derby day is coming up. I wanna be hearing ‘em  _ rumble. _ ”

“Right before they  _ blow, _ ” Lou bellowed into Dad’s ear, and he turned his head at the force of her voice.

“So we gotta proposition for you- you’re gonna fix a couple a’ things up for us. Job opened up-”

“Last guy had a lil’  _ workplace accident _ -”

“Come to think of it, so did the guy before  _ that- _ ”

“Squashed like a  _ bug _ -”

“Every fuckin’ time!”

Mickey patted Dad's cheek, like he was a dog, before standing to join her sister, slouching side by side, towering over him. He just kept glaring up at them, no signs of weakness or surrender.

I could see Mom squirming.

Hear my own heartbeat, thumping away with every second that went by, every second closer to the Twins putting a pistol to my Dad's temple and pulling the trigger.

“So what’ll it be Nicky? You wanna keep your people livin’ on our land? You ain't gonna be a maggot any more. You gotta give back.”

There it was. The honest truth. We were insects, living on the corpse of a dead land. Colourful and full of life as it seems, it had died all those years ago, along with everyone else, Peggies and Resistance alike. And I was suddenly reminded of how many worlds were surrounding us in that moment, watching us.

And how, among all the people in those worlds, we were completely, totally alone.

… Only, I felt a smooth, ghostly whisper tickle my ear:

_ “And gentlemen in England now a-bed, _

_ Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here, _

_ And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks, _

_ That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s Day.” _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was insanely difficult to write, holy crap hahahaha! But I hope it was OK! I wonder what our resident Shakespeare nerd ghost plans to do? Find out next time... whenever next time is hahahaha! Next update will be Whore of Babylon Chapter 3... which I haven't written either so I'd better get moving!
> 
> As per usual, you can find me on Tumblr at unclefungusthegoat!
> 
> Merci beaucoup! À bientôt!  
> Chloe x


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